Vim substitution of a list of words with another same length list of words?

Question

I need to substitute a list of words with with an equally long list of words.

So for example you have: "a","b","c","d","e","f"

And you want to replace each word with the uppercase version of each word: "A","B","C","D","E","F"

I know how to find each string using the regex: (a\|b\|c\|d\|e\|f)

I know you could do a global substitution for each word. But when the length of the words gets large this approach would become un-wieldly and inelegant.

Is there a way to somehow do one global substitution? Similar to:

:%s/\(a\|b\|c\|d\|e\|f\)/INSERT_REPLACEMENT_LIST/

I am not sure if this is even possible.

Answer 1

You can use a dictionary of items mapped to their replacements, then use that in the right side of the search/replace.

:let r={'a':'A', 'b':'B', 'c':'C', 'd':'D', 'e':'E'}
:%s/\v(a|b|c|d|e)/\=r[submatch(1)]/g

See :h sub-replace-\= and :h submatch(). If you want to cram that into one line, you could use a literal dictionary.

:%s/\v(a|b|c|d|e)/\={'a':'A','b':'B','c':'C','d':'D','e':'E'}[submatch(1)]/g

The specific example you gave of uppercasing letters would be more simply done as

:%s/[a-e]/\U\0/g

Answer 2

:%s/(a\|b\|c\|d\|e\|f)/\U\0/g