Running AWK in Vim's search

Question

How can you run AWK in Vim's selection of the search?

My pseudo-code

%s/!awk '{ print $2 }'//d

I am trying to delete the given column in the file.

Answer 1

Though they probably address the issue of the original poster, none of the answer addresses the issue advertised in the title of the question. My proposal to remove the first line of the question and to retitle it as "Deleting one column in vim" having been unanimously rejected, here is a solution for people arriving there by actually looking for that.

Deleting a column (here the second one, as in OP's pseudocode example) with awk in vim :

:%!awk '{$2=""; print $0}'

Of course, it also works for a portion of the file — e.g. for lines 10 to 20 :

:10,20!awk '{$2=""; print $0}'

As for "[running] awk in Vim's selection of the search", not sure you can exactly do that but anyway the search and substitution is an easy job for awk, if not its primary purpose. The following replaces "pattern" with "betterpattern" in the second column if it matches :

:%!awk '$2~"pattern" {gsub("pattern","betterpattern",$2)}

Note that the NOT operator requires escaping (\! instead of !). The following replaces the value in the second column by its increment by 10 if it matches "number" and let other lines unchanged :

:%!awk '$2~"number" {gsub($1,$1+10)} $2\!~"number" {print $0}'

Appart from this point it's just awk syntax.

Answer 2

In command mode, press Ctrl-v to go into visual mode, then you can block-select the column using cursor movement keys. You can then yank and put it or delete it or whatever you need using the appropriate vim commands and keystrokes.