Delete numbers at the beginning of lines

Question

I have a file "file.txt" in which some rows begins with numbers.

E.g. file.txt:

1 bla bla 390
23 foo foo 100
# bar bar 

some word

45 junk

Is there an easy and fast way to delete the numbers (and the space) from all the lines that start with a number, while deleting only the space from the others?

I would like a command so that the file then looks like:

bla bla 390
foo foo 100
# bar bar 

some word

junk

Answer 1

You can use the command editor line:

:%s/^\d*//

This uses the global search %s to find any line that begins with a digit \d* and replace it with nothing //.

Additionally, if you need to remove the extra space after the number as well:

:%s/^\d* //