Find, convert and replace dates with Vim substitutions

Find, convert and replace dates with Vim substitutions

By Jeff Kreeftmeijer on 2017-10-17, last updated on 2021-01-07

(revisions)

Vim’s substitution command is a powerful way to make changes to text files. Besides finding and replacing text using regular expressions, substitutions can call out to external programs for more complicated replacements. By using the date utility from a substitution, Vim can convert all dates in a file to a different format and replace them all at once.

The input file is an HTML page with a list of articles. Each article includes a <time> tag with a value and a datetime attribute to show the publication date.

The input file

We need to convert the dates’ values to a friendlier format that includes the full month name (“September 19, 2017”), while keeping the datetime attributes in their current format.

The result: articles with reformatted dates

The input file has more than forty articles, so replacing them all by hand would be a lot of error-prone work. Instead, we write a substitution that finds all dates in the file and replaces them with a reformatted value.

Finding the dates

The first step in replacing the dates is finding where they are in the input file and making sure not to match the ones in the datetime attributes.

Finding patterns

Vim searches for text by pressing esc to get to normal mode, then /, followed by a search pattern. Type esc /2017 to find all occurrences of "2017" in a file.

The dot (.) is a wildcard that matches any single character. Searching for 20.. (esc /20..) matches “2017”, but also “2015”, “2078”, “20a%”, and “20°c”.

To find all dates in the file, we could use ....-..-.. (esc /....-..-..) as our search pattern to match the date format. However, this pattern’s results will include all matching dates in the file, including the ones in the <time> tags’ datetime attributes.

In the input file, all <time> values are immediately followed by the less-than sign from the closing </time> tag. To prevent the datetimes from the attributes to be included in the results, we could include the less-than sign in the search pattern and make sure to add it back when replacing.

....-..-..<

Hoever, Vim supports setting the start and end of the match in the search pattern using the \zs and \ze pattern atoms. By prefixing the < in our search pattern with \ze, the pattern finds all dates followed by a less-than sign, but doesn’t include it in the match, meaning it won’t be replaced.

....-..-..\ze<

Reformatting dates from the command line

We need the month’s full name in the date replacements, so we can’t reorder the input value (“2017-09-19”) to get the result we want. Instead, we need to call out to an external utility that knows month names and can convert between date formats.

The date utility

The date utility returns the current date and time. The desired output format is passed in through a trailing argument that starts with a plus sign. It needs to be wrapped in quotes if it contains any whitespace.

$ date
Thu Oct 17 09:41:10 CEST 2017
$ date +%Y-%m-%d
2017-10-17
$ date +"%B %d, %Y"
October 17, 2017

On macOS (or other derivatives of BSD) passing a date to the date utility overwrites the system date unless the -j flag is passed. With that flag, the utility allows passing a test date to be reformatted. The test date needs to be formatted as [[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.ss] by default or we can pass a custom input format with -f.

$ date -j110200361991.35
Sat Nov  2 00:36:35 CET 1991
$ date -jf %Y-%m-%d 1991-11-02
Sat Nov  2 09:41:27 CET 1991

GNU date uses the --date argument to pass in dates, and it figures out the input format on its own.

# date --date=1991-11-02
Sat Nov  2 00:00:00 UTC 1991

By setting the input and output format, we can use the date utility to reformat dates.

$ date -jf %Y-%m-%d 1991-11-02 +"%B %d, %Y" # BSD
November 02, 1991

# date --date=1991-11-02 +"%B %d, %Y" # GNU
November 02, 1991

We reformat each match of our search pattern to our desired format (“September 19, 2017”) with the date utility. We use "%Y-%m-%d" as the input format to match the results from the search pattern. The output format is "%B %d, %Y" to produce the month’s full name, the date’s number, a comma and the year number.

With these formats the date utility reformats 1991-11-02 to November 02, 1991.

$ date -jf "%Y-%m-%d" "1991-11-02" +"%B %d, %Y"
November 02 1991

Calling out to external utilities from substitutions

We know how to find all dates in the file, and how to convert a date to another format from the command line. To replace all found dates with a reformatted version from the date utility, we need to run an expression from a substitution.

Substitutions

Vim’s substitutions can find and replace text. To replace “November” with “October” throughout a file, we execute a substitution where the pattern is November and the substitute string is October.

:%s/November/October/gc

Note:

Options can be passed after the last slash. In this case, we use g[lobal] to make the substitution global, meaning it will replace all occurrences of the pattern in the file. The second option is c[onfirm], which will ask for confirmation before executing each substitution.

Using the search pattern we prepared earlier, we can find and replace all date values from the input file with a substitution. For example, we could overwrite all dates with a hardcoded value:

:%s/....-..-..\ze</November 2, 1991/gc

Instead of inserting a hardcoded substitute string, we need to run an expression for each match to get its replacement.

Expressions

When a substitute string starts with \=, Vim evaluates it as an expression.

We can call Vim’s built in functions from an expression. To replace all numbers in a file with the number of the line they’re on, we use the line() function from an expression in the substitute string.

%s/\d\+/\=line('.')/gc

Vim provides the system() function to call out to an external command and use the result as the replacement string. To replace all numbers in a file with a random number, we call echo -n $RANDOM with the system() function.

:%s/\d\+/\=system('echo -n $RANDOM')/gc

We use the system() function from an expression (\=) to call out to the date utility. Sticking with hardcoded dates for now, we can use the utility to convert a date’s format from “1991-11-02” to “November 2, 1991” before inserting it into the file:

:%s/....-..-..\ze</\=system('date -jf "%Y-%m-%d" "1991-11-02" +"%B %d, %Y"')/gc

Warning:

This substitution produces a newline before the <time> tag, because the date utility appends one to its output. We’ll remove these later while discussing nested substitutions.

The replacement value is still hardcoded (“1991-11-02”), so this substitution will overwrite all date values in the file to a date in 1991. To put the matched date values back in the file, we need to pass them to the date command.

Submatches

Vim’s submatch() function returns matches from our pattern. If we call it with 0 as its argument, it will return the whole match instead of a submatch. To wrap each occurrence of “October” in brackets, we use [\0] as the substitute string.

:%s/October/[\0]/gc

In an expression, submatches can be included using the submatch() function.

:%s/October/\='['.submatch('0').']'/gc

To pass the matched date to the call to date in our expression, we need to break out of the string passed to the system() function and replace the hardcoded date with a call to submatch(0) to insert the whole match.

:%s/....-..-..\ze</\=system('date -jf "%Y-%m-%d" "'.submatch(0).'" +"%B %d, %Y"')/gc

Running this substitution will turn all <time> tags from the input file to our desired format, but it puts a newline before the closing </time> tag.

The current result, with an added newline before the closing </time> tag

Nested substitutions

A newline is appended to the result of the date command, which ends up in the file after running the substitution. Since there’s no way to get the date command to omit the newline, we need to take it out ourselves.

We can run a second substitution to remove them after running the first one:

:%s/\n<\/time>/<\/time>/g

To keep the original substitution from adding newlines in the first place, we can pipe the result from the date command to tr to remove the newline with the -d argument:

:%s/....-..-..\ze</\=system('date -jf "%Y-%m-%d" "'.submatch(0).'" +"%B %d, %Y" | tr -d "\n"')/gc

Another option is to take the newline out with a nested substitution.

The substitute() function

Vim’s substitute() function replaces strings and can be run from an expression in a substitution. Nested substitutions are useful for transforming the result of another function.

The function (substitute()) works like the substitute command (:s), and takes the same arguments, so substitute("input", "find", "replace", "g") is equivalent to running :%s/find/replace/g in a file.

The substitute() function works like the substitute command (:s[ubstitute]) in Vim’s command line and takes the same arguments. The first argument is the input, then the search pattern, the substitute string, followed by optional options. substitute("input", "find", "replace", "g") is equivalent to running :%s/find/replace/g in a file.

:echom substitute("October 02, 1991", "October", "November", "")

If an external command called from a substitution returns a trailing newline (like echo would without the -n flag), we can use the substitute() function to take it out before the match is replaced.

:%s/October/\=substitute(system('echo "November"'), "\n", "", "")/gc

We wrap the call to the date utility in a nested substitution using the substitute() function. It takes the result, matches the newline ("\n") and replaces it with an empty string.

:%s/....-..-..\ze</\=substitute(system('date -jf "%Y-%m-%d" "'.submatch(0).'" +"%B %d, %Y"'), "\n", "", "")/gc

Now our substitution will turn the <time> tags into the correct format, without adding that extra newline.

The result

<ul>
  <li>
    <article>
      <time datetime="2017-10-17">October 17, 2017</time>
      <span><a href="/vim-reformat-dates/">Find, convert and replace dates with Vim substitutions</a></span>
    </article>
  </li>
  <li>
    <article>
      <time datetime="2017-09-19">September 19, 2017</time>
      <span><a href="/open-source-maintainability/">Keeping open source software projects maintainable</a></span>
    </article>
  </li>
  <li>
    <article>
      <time datetime="2017-08-22">August 22, 2017</time>
      <span><a href="/mix-proper/">Property-based testing in Elixir using PropEr</a></span>
    </article>
  </li>
  …

Thanks Wouter Vos and Rico Sta. Cruz for feedback on the substitution command styling, u/Vurpius for suggesting \ze and Ben Sinclair for suggesting piping through tr.

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