Vim regex-fu for LaTeX

Posted on September 24, 2009 by robfelty

When writing a beamer presentation with LaTeX, I organize my presentation into sections and subsections. Frequently, the title of the first frame (slide) in a subsection has the same name as the subsection. Let’s say I start off with the following structure:

\section[corpora]{Accessing text corpora}
\subsection[gutenberg]{The Gutenberg Corpus}
\subsection[chat]{The web and chat Corpus}
\subsection[brown]{The Brown Corpus}
\subsection[reuters]{The Reuters Corpus}
\subsection[inaugural]{The Inaugural address Corpus}
\subsection[annotated]{Annotated corpora}
\subsection[foreign]{Corpora in other languages}
\subsection[DIY]{Loading your own corpora}

For each subsection, I want to put in one frame, with the name of the subsection being the name of the frame. Regular expressions to the rescue! In vim, all I have to is use V to select each line with subsection, then I hit :, which allows me to operate on those lines only.

'<,'>

is automatically inserted after the colon, which stands for “from the beginning of the highlighted section to the end of it”. Then I use s to perform my substitution. \r inserts a new line.

:'<,'>s/{\(.*\)}/{\1}\r\\begin{frame}\r\\frametitle<presentation>{\1}\r\\end{frame}/

The result is:

\section[corpora]{Accessing text corpora}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{Accessing text corpora}
\end{frame}
\subsection[gutenberg]{The Gutenberg Corpus}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{The Gutenberg Corpus}
\end{frame}
\subsection[chat]{The web and chat Corpus}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{The web and chat Corpus}
\end{frame}
\subsection[brown]{The Brown Corpus}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{The Brown Corpus}
\end{frame}
\subsection[reuters]{The Reuters Corpus}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{The Reuters Corpus}
\end{frame}
\subsection[inaugural]{The Inaugural address Corpus}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{The Inaugural address Corpus}
\end{frame}
\subsection[annotated]{Annotated corpora}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{Annotated corpora}
\end{frame}
\subsection[foreign]{Corpora in other languages}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{Corpora in other languages}
\end{frame}
\subsection[DIY]{Loading your own corpora}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle<presentation>{Loading your own corpora}
\end{frame}
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3 Responses to Vim regex-fu for LaTeX

  1. Pingback: Jürgen Fenn (juergenfenn) 's status on Thursday, 24-Sep-09 17:50:33 UTC - Identi.ca

  2. Jan Hlavacek says:
    September 24, 2009 at 11:33 pm

    Instead of selecting lines, you can also do

    :%g/\\subsection/s/{\(.*\)}/{\1}\r\\begin{frame}\r\\frametitle<presentation>{\1}\r\\end{frame}/

    The advantage is that it will work even if you have other text between the lines with \subsection.

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