Trying to remove the first column of a document.

Question

I'm using this command below to remove the first column of a document:

%s/^[^\t]*\zs\t[^\t]*\ze//g 

but it says command not found. Any idea?

Solution 1

Here's the quickest way to remove the first column:

1. Press gg to go to the first character in the document.
2. Hit Ctrl+V to enter visual block mode.
3. Hit G (that is, shift-g) to go to the end of the document
4. Hit x to delete the first column.

Solution 2

I like the block selection solution of @Peter, but if you want to use substitution you need this command:

:%s/^.//

Let's analyze why this works:

• :%s exec a substitution on all the document
• /^./ select the first character after the start of the line
• / and replace it with... nothing.

Solution 3

If I understand you correctly, this should do the job:

:%s/^[^\t]//

The command removes all leading characters that are not a tabulator.

Alternatively, if you're editing a tabulator separated values document and want to remove all "columns" before the first tabulator, then this should do it for you:

%s/^[^\t]*\t//

Comments

[akira]

har, i posted that on SU (see cross post) .. but then deleted it because it is unclear if the first char already makes the first column .. :)

[Warren Rumak]

This seems to delete the column with the first character, not necessarily the first column. If you want to delete a column of whitespace, for example, this won't work.

[z atef]

%s/^[^\t]*\t// worked fro me. It deleted the first column in a tab-del-file.