Helpful Coder

 I'm working on a largish project, converting it to work from early PHP 5 to PHP 7.3 and I found myself spending a lot of time converting all those various mysql_* to their equivalent procedural mysqli_* function calls. Mostly pretty tedious. Anytime you encounter something tedious that you'll have to do on a ton of files, it's a chance for automation. In this case, I decided come up with a vim macro that would automagically convert the most commonly occurring function calls. Here's the macro, which uses 4 regular expressions to search and replace the four most common ones - then followed by a search for "mysql_" to catch any outliers. :% s/mysql_query(\(.\{-}\),\(.\{-}\))/mysqli_query(\1 , \2)/eg :% s/mysql_fetch/mysqli_fetch/eg :% s/mysql_num/mysqli_num/eg :% s/mysql_close/mysqli_close/ge :/mysql_ The easiest way to use this is to paste into a new document, then select it all and yank it into a buffer. Then just run the buffer as macro. So, I used 'm...

This is something I run into pretty often, so I thought I'd share how I handle it, in case it's helpful. Sometimes you have a list of image files, and you need to create the html formatting to make them into a gallery of some sort. Imagine each file has two versions, a full size and a thumbnail image. Pretty common scenario. The URL for the files will look like /images/gallery/full/[filename] and /images/gallery/thumb/[filename] There's lots of ways to do this, here's what works well for me. First I grab a list of the files from the command line, ending up with something like this ls -l -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 388044 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161205_120541.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 451788 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161215_114201.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 298125 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161216_121618.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 369981 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161216_125940.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 479464 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161216_131010.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 664528 May 25 11:16 IMG_20...

Was just working on some server cleanup for a client and thought that this might be a handy tip for anyone out there in a similar situation... Here's the problem, I have a directory on a server that has lots (i.e. thousands) of subdirectories. I need to copy those up to an S3 backup bucket - organized by year and month - and then delete them. The tricky bit is they're not organized by month/year right now. It's just a giant mess of subdirectories without much of a coherent naming strategy. So, here's what I've come up with so far. First, I generate a text file listing all the directories, filtering through grep for the year I'm interested in, i.e. ls -ltr | grep 2019 > list.txt This gives me a list of all directory entries that have '2019' in them, which should get them all since we're using 'ls -l' Next, I open that file in vim, and copy all the files for the month I'm backing up, and use a regex to remove the leading bi...

Over on Ars Technica - how to get common IDE features in VIM. Gonna have to try some of these! The code navigation sidebar looks particularly useful, especially for one of the large sites I support at work.

This is a problem I run into fairly often, because I do a bit of hand-coding HTML from word files or other content that clients send me. When you cut and paste the items for a bullet list into an html document, they often come in one per line with no formatting (or sometimes they have a "*" at the start of each line. Obviously you can create a macro to automate the process of putting <li> tags around each item, but there's an even faster way to do this using vi's powerful regular expression tools. Of course, this will only be useful if you can use vi, a command-line text-editor. If you're on shared hosting or something, you may be out of luck. There is a windows version of vi, but I haven't really done more than mess with it a bit. If you're on OSX, you're probably in luck - you can use the console, and I think that it has vim installed, although it's been like eight years since I used OSX regularly. First, figure out the lines that you w...

VI lets you use buffers to quickly copy and save chunks of text. You can think of them as being sort of like the clipboard that you copy to when you highlight some text in Word or other such programs - except that you have many, many more clipboards at your disposal. Here's how it works. In VI, highlight some text that you want to copy - hit v and then move the cursor around to highlight the text. Then decide what buffer you want to copy it to. The buffers are identified by a letter - so let's say you wanted to copy some text to the "h" buffer - you would type the following (with the text highlighted) "hy which "yanks" that text into the buffer. You could then paste the contents of that buffer with "hp The contents of the buffers persist until something replaces them - which makes them a great place to store those little snippets of text you use a lot. And in reference to my earlier post about using macros , you can even use buffers within a mac...

God I love VI. Well, actually, vim but whatever. Here's another reason why. Suppose you need to perform some repetitive task over and over, such as updating the copyright date in the footer of a static website. (Yes, yes I know you could do a javascript thing or whatever, just bear with me.) Of course you could just search and replace in some text editor, changing "2007" to "2008" (if you're stupid) - and you'll end up with a bunch of incorrect dates being changed, most likely. What you need to do is only change that date at the bottom. And suppose that because of the formatting, you can't use the "Copy" part of the string in a search replace - perhaps some of the pages use "©", some spell out "Copyright" etc. This is where vi macros come in handy. A macro in vi is exactly what you expect, it records your actions and allows you to play them back. To start recording, press q followed by a character to use to "stor...