How do I find all lines with more than N occurences of a character using Vim

Question

I'm trying to located all lines in a file where the | (pipe) character occurs more than 21 times. The | character is a field delimiter, so there is no specific number of characters that may fall between | instances. Is there an easy way to do this in Vim?

NOTE: I am using gVim on a Windows machine, so I won't be able to use any *nix specific tricks.

TIA

Answer 1

You can use a regexp to find such lines with the normal search function:

/\v(\|[^|]*){21,}

The \v makes sure the regexp works regardless of the value of the magic option (it makes all non-alphanumeric characters (except underscore) special; I also use it here to avoid having to put backslashes before the (, ), {, and }).

If you want to see all such lines at once, then you can combine it with the :g command:

:g/\v(\|[^|]*){21,}/p

Incidentally, this type of command (from the ex predecessor to vi) is the origin for the name of the grep tool (g/re/p: re short for regexp).

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If your source data is “pipe delimited”, then you should probably check to see if any of the values have embedded pipe characters (maybe done by escaping (e.g. prefixed with a backslash), doubling, or quoting). The regexp method above can be extended to cover most escaping and doubling methods, but parsing quoted values usually requires power expressive power than most regexp languages can offer.