How to embed python expression into :s command in vim?

Question

I can use \=expr in :s command. For example, to convert timestamps format inplace:

:%s/\v<\d{10}>/\=strftime('%c', submatch(0))/g

But the functionality of built-in functions are so limited. To parse a timestamp, I'd like to use python script like this:

$ python
>>> import datetime
>>> d = 'Apr 11 2012'
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(d, '%b %d %Y').isoformat()
'2012-04-11T00:00:00'

How to embed this py-expr into :s command?

:%s/\v\w+ \d{2} \d{4}/\={?py-expr?}/g

Thanks!

Note: if you believe vim doc, space may have a special meaning and thus needs to be escaped in very-magic mode. Only 0-9, a-z, A-Z and _ ASCII characters are said explicitly to have no special meaning in this mode. — ZyX
– ZyX, Commented Nov 4, 2012 at 17:27

ZyX · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-04 17:20:04Z

8

If you have at least vim-7.3.569 then you may do the following:

:python import datetime
:%s/\v\w+\ \d{2}\ \d{4}/\=pyeval('datetime.datetime.strptime(vim.eval("submatch(0)"), "%b %d %Y").isoformat()')/g

. If you don’t you have recent vim you can emulate pyeval in this case:

function Pyeval(expr)
    python import json
    python vim.command('return '+json.dumps(eval(vim.eval('a:expr'))))
endfunction

, then replace pyeval in the above code with Pyeval.

answered Nov 4, 2012 at 17:20

ZyX

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