Vim’s regular expression search and/or replace is great! e.g. before uploading the goodmovie list I wanted to convert all the movie page links to actual html links (OpenOffice somehow didn’t acutomatically do it).
It was originally:
<TD [foo]> [actual link] </TD>
and I wanted each such entry to be:
<TD [foo]> <A href="[actual link]"> [actual link] </A></TD>
A normal search and replace wouldn’t work because each pattern is different (different movie links). So the way to do this in VIM (no VI) is:
%s/<TD \(.\+\)>\(http:.\+\)<\/TD>/<TD \1><A HREF="\2">\2<\/A><\/TD>
This is a good link for Vim regular expressions.