[TriLUG] vi question

[Aaron Schrab]

At 13:25 -0400 16 Jul 2008, Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>I'm trying to match multiple commas in a line in vi so I can globally change
>them to a single comma (yup, I'm building a .csv file).
>
>Here's an example line::
>
>,101.5000,WRAL,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Raleigh,,,,,,,,,,,,,,BF,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Rock
>
>The leading comma is ok, I really don't care about that, it's easy enough to
>strip out.
>
>:1,$s/\,+/\,/g  is NOT working.  Grr.  Any hints?  I know I'm overlooking
>something extraordinarily simple here....

Real vi doesn't support the + modifier.  Vim (and possibly other 
enhanced vi implementations) has support for this type of modifier, but 
to avoid breaking compatibility it uses \+ instead of just +.  By itself 
+ is taken literally.

The comma isn't a special character, so it doesn't need to be backslash 
escaped, although it doesn't currently cause problems.