How to delete the last word from each line in vim?

Question

Please let me know, How I can remove the last word from each line using vim commands? Before :

abcdef 123
xyz 1256
qwert 2
asdf 159

after :

abcdef
xyz
qwert
asdf

Similarly please let me know how to remove the second word from each line using vim command?

Solution 1

Use the following regex (in ex mode):

%s/\s*\w\+\s*$//

This tells it to find optional whitespace, followed by one or more word characters, followed by optional whitespace, followed by end of line—then replace it with nothing.

Solution 2

The question's been answered already, but here's what I'd more likely end up doing:

Record a macro:
qq to record a macro into register "q"
$ to go to the end of the line
daw to delete a word
q to stop recording

Then select the rest of the lines:
j to go down a line
vG to select to the end of the file

And apply the macro:
:norm @q

---

Some similar alternatives:

:%norm $daw

qq$dawjq (note the added j) then 999@q to replay the macro many times. (Macro execution stops at the first "error" -- in this case, you'd probably hit the bottom of the file, j would not work, and the macro would stop.)

Solution 3

The key for this is the :substitute command; it is very powerful (and often used in vi / Vim).

You need to come up with a regular expression pattern that matches what you want to delete. For the last word, that's whitespace (\s), one or more times \+ (or any number (*), depending on how you want to treat single-word lines), followed by word characters (\w\+), anchored to the end of the line ($). Note that word has a special meaning in Vim; you may want to use a different atom (e.g. \S). Voila:

:%s/\s\+\w\+$//

For the second word, you can make use of the special \zs and \ze atoms that assert for matches, but do not actually match: Anchored at the start (^), match a word, then start the match for a second one:

:%s/^\w\+\s\+\zs\w\+\s\+//

Soon, you'll also want to reorder things, not just remove them. For that, you need to know capturing groups: \(...\). The text matched by those can then be referred to in the replacement part. For example, to swap the first and second words:

:%s/^\(\w\+\s\+\)\(\w\+\s\+\)/\2\1/

For details, have a look at the help, especially :help :substitute and :help pattern.

Solution 4

To remove the second word from the start of a line, use the following:

:%s/^\(\s*\w\+\s\+\)\w\+\s*/\1/

Update

To treat special characters as part of the word, you have to use the \S (which matches all non-whitespace characters) instead of \w (which matches only word characters [0-9A-Za-z_]). Then, the command would be:

:%s/^\(\s*\S\+\s\+\)\S\+\s*/\1/

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