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Filtering KVirc Logs With vim

In our series of highly specialized tasks nobody is likely to ever do, we present a way to quickly remove KVirc markup from IRC logs.

KVirc annotates lines in two ways:

• A number at the beginning of a line, indicating the type of the message,
• Annotations to mark e.g. user names and links.

Filtering the type number is trivial, but removing the annotation markers requires a bit of regex-fu. I chose to do it in vim, simply because it gave me visual feedback, and because I had it open anyway. The resulting command was:

%s/^M\![a-z]\+^M\(.\{-}\)^M/\1/g

where ^M is a literal 0x0d character, input by ^v^m. The one not really intuitive part in that is the \{-} which is a non-greedy zero-or-more match, which would be expressed as *? in most other regular expression dialects.

By Shadowdancer, 2009-03-27, 10:12; permalink;
Last updated at 2009-03-27, 10:16 by Shadowdancer