Assorted Handy vim Commands, Part 1

Posted on January 28, 2009

To reverse the order of lines, eg 1-5
: 1,5 g/^/m0
For example,

one
two
three
four
five

becomes

five
four
three
two
one

To remove blank lines
: %g/^$/d

Delete all lines that don’t contain “string”
: %v/string/d

Turn all links in an HTML file into ‘#’

Posted on January 24, 2009

Replace all in the current file instances of:

<a href=”link_to_somewhere.html”>link</a>

with:

<a href=”#”>link</a>

:%s/\(a href="\)\(\S\+\)\("\)/\1#\3/g

This is great if you’ve got a big HTML file that you want to demo to a client where you don’t want the links to do anything when clicked.

You could also use javascript to do the same thing – just “return false” for all <a> elements on the page.

vim: Quickly assign POST variables in PHP

Posted on January 22, 2009

You’ve got a web form with lots of fields, and you want to POST them to a PHP script. Open vim, and list the INPUT tag’s NAME attributes, one per line.

<?php
firstname
lastname
address1
address2
state
postcode
?>

Now with some search-and-replace magic we can save ourself a lot of boring typing. Hit ‘escape’ to get out of insert mode, type a colon (“:”) and copy-paste this:

%s/^\(\S\+\)/\$\1 = \$_POST\[\'\1\'\];

I won’t bother explaining it unless someone asks. But what you should end up with is this:

<?php
$firstname = $_POST['firstname'];
$lastname = $_POST['lastname'];
$address1 = $_POST['address1'];
$address2 = $_POST['address2'];
$state = $_POST['state'];
$postcode = $_POST['postcode'];
?>

Perhaps not worth it when you have 6 variables like this example; but quite handy when you have 60 variables!

Create a MySQL database

Posted on January 21, 2009

I generally only need to do this once for each project, which means I don’t do it often enough to remember. Log in to the MySQL server as root, then:

create database newdb;
grant all on newdb.* to 'newuser'@'localhost' identified by 'newuser';
set password for 'newuser'@'localhost' = password('newpass');

And you’re ready to go!
Replace newdb, newuser and newpass with whatever you like.

Welcome

Posted on January 20, 2009

Welcome to my new site. I plan to post things here about the things that I’m doing, along with tips for other web developers. I’m not worried about sharing my knowledge – it’s all available on the internet anyway. Why not have it all in one place?

It’ll be like my own personal notebook – one that everyone can take advantage of. I feel all warm and fuzzy.