Paste multiple lines inside tags as separate line each - Sublime text

Question

I have to set a list of title/authors item inside an html page, with each title/author line inside a <li> like this:

<ul>   <li> title name - <em>author name</em></li>   <li> title name - <em>author name</em></li>   <li> title name - <em>author name</em></li>   and so on... </ul> 

They gave me an Excel file with two columns, one for title and one for authors, with about 90-100 rows.

What is the best and quickest way to obtain a list with <li>s like those stated above? (I use Sublime Text 2)

Simply copy/pasting inside Sublime Text 2, i have a separate line for each title/author row, like this

title name author name title name author name title name author name 

nothing else..

I can easely wrap every single line inside an <li> thx to:

menu Selection -> Split into Lines (Cmd/Ctlr + Shift + L)

and typing the tags, but then i'm stuck to insert, in a sort of automated way, the dash ( - ) after the titles and the <em>s for the authors.

My best guess is (but I really don't know how to do that) to find a way to copy/paste a bunch of lines and then paste them where every single cursor stand, each as a separate line like this (consider the | as the cursor):

*copy* authors name as single lines  |author name1 |author name2 |author name3  |author name4  *paste* authors as single line each where the cursor "|" stands  <li>title name - <em> |author name1 </em></li> <li>title name - <em> |author name2 </em></li> <li>title name - <em> |author name3 </em></li> <li>title name - <em> |author name4 </em></li> 

Unfortunately what actually happens (in sublime text 2) is this:

<li>title name - <em> |author name1                        author name2                        author name3                         author name4 </em></li> <li>title name - <em> |author name1                        author name2                        author name3                         author name4 </em></li> <li>title name - <em> |author name1                        author name2                        author name3                         author name4 </em></li> <li>title name - <em> |author name1                        author name2                        author name3                         author name4 </em></li> 

all the copied lines simply get pasted in block for every single cursor

Answer 1

Probably you only have to verify that the number of lines copied to the clipboard matches the number of lines splitted with CMD+SHIFT+L.

If they match, Sublime Text behaves as you expected, copying each source line to each destination line (at least on my machine... :).

Answer 2

I actually just found the answer to this, and wanted to share just in case anyone else encounters this. Riccardo is right but I can expand.

Sublime will paste in chunks when you expect to paste in place when there is not a match between the number of sources and targets. I've encountered your bug when there's an extra hard return or extra element. So for example.

|author name1 |author name2 

Will trigger Sublime to paste the two values into place because there are two source values and one target element.

<li>title name - <em> |author name1                        author name2 </em></li> 

So to Riccard's point, you likely might have had selected a little extra that Sublime recognized as a extra value.

So to fix this, you'll need to have equal sources and targets.

|author name1 |author name2  <li>title name - <em> |author name1 </em></li> <li>title name - <em> |author name2 </em></li>