Is there an equivalent to sed-style substitution commands from vim?

Question

One of the things I miss from vim is being able to type in a substitution command that will work over multiple lines, for example:

:/begin/,/end/s/foo/bar/g

The above command substitutes "foo" for "bar" starting with the first line containing "begin" and ending with the next line after that containing "end".

Is there a way to do something similar in emacs?

Answer 1

evil provides a stripped-down version of ex, so it's probably best to presume that it's not an exact drop-in. However, the example you provided works out of the box, provided that point is prior to the first line (ie, the begin line in your example).

Answer 2

Here is one way of doing it that uses built-in functionality only:

1. With point in the line that contains first occurrence of begin, press C-SPC.

2. Move to next occurrence of end:

   C-s end RET

3. Replace foo with bar:

   M-% foo RET bar RET !

This makes use of the fact that query-replace will work on the active region instead of the whole buffer if there is one.

---

Of course, you can also define a custom command:

(defun replace-from-to (beg end str repl)
  (interactive "sBegin: \nsEnd: \nsString: \nsReplacement: ")
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (let ((start-pos (search-forward beg))
          (end-pos (search-forward end)))
      (replace-string str repl nil start-pos end-pos))))

This command will always search from the beginning of the buffer, so point can be after begin/foo/end when you invoke it.

Set up a key binding for it via:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c r") 'replace-from-to)

Answer 3

In general, this is something that you would use narrow-to-region for.

You move the cursor (for example, by searching) to the beginning of the region and press C-SPC, then move to the end of the region and type M-x narrow-to-region. Now you can issue any search and replace commands that you want and they will only apply to narrowed part of the buffer. Once you're done, type M-x widen to restore the buffer content.