Setup a shortcut to replace easily selected strings in VIM - php

Question

I have a lot of php/html files with many strings that should be internationalized with gettext.
Therefore, I have to go through each file, spot the "message" strings and replace each one by
<?= _("<my string>") ?>
I use vim and would like to setup a shortcut (map) to do it easily in insert mode (With CtrlR for instance).
Do you know how to achieve that ?

Answer 1

I would use Tim Pope's wonderful surround plugin to accomplish this.
Add the following to your ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/php.vim file:
let b:surround_{char2nr('_')} = "<?= _(\"\r\") ?>"
Now you can select some via visual mode then surround. e.g vitS_
If you are in insert mode you can surround text via <c-s>_ and you cursor will be inserted in between the double quotes.
As a bonus if you want to do the delete the surrounding <?= _("<text here>") ?> and only leave <text here> you can add the following to your ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/php.vim as well:
nmap <buffer> <silent> ds_ ds<dt(%df?[(xds"
Tim Pope has many great plugins I highly suggest you take a look some of them.
For more help see:
:h surround
:h surround-customizing
:h after-directory
:h curly-braces-names
:h b:var

Answer 2

My guess is that you want the original message to actually be the input to the _() function, do you not?
The best thing I can think for you to do is to use macros. If I were doing this I would probably do something like record a macro #1 for one-word "messages" (that need to be replaced), #2 for two-word messages, #3 for 3 and so on. Then I could just skim or search through the documents and type #1 on the start of any one-word message like one
to replace it with <?= _("one") ?>. I would use #2 on a message like two words to transform it to <?= _("two words") /> and so forth.
To create/record the macro for one-word messages, #1, type these keys, preferably on the start of a one-word message:
q1i<?= _("<Esc>eli") ?><Esc>q
q 1 i < ? = Space _ ( " Esc e l i " ) Space ? > Esc q
The macros for more words can be created very similarly, just add additional es for more words. So for #2, type this:
q1i<?= _("<Esc>eeli") ?><Esc>q
q 1 i < ? = Space _ ( " Esc e e l i " ) Space ? > Esc q
In the case of really long messages, I would probably use an open and close macro. The open one would place <?= _(" wherever I had my cursor and the close one would put ") ?> wherever I had my cursor.

Answer 3

If you want to surround this strings manually and if your message does not contain ", then you can (after putting cursor somewhere inside the message) do the following once:
qaf"a)<Esc>2F"i_(<Esc>q
(press real escape for <Esc>) then, after putting the cursor on the next message, repeat this by
#a
(if you don’t like a, replace it with another latin lowercase letter here and above after q). If you still want to have a mapping:
:nnoremap <C-r> f"a)<Esc>2F"i_(<Esc>
. This time <Esc> is literally <, E, s, c, >.
First is using macros and they are quite handy as defining a mapping is more to type. Depending on 'viminfo' option they may be even saved across vim sessions, but you should not really rely on this, so if you want something persistent use the mapping putting it in the vimrc.
Update: If you don’t have <? "message" ?> which I assumed, but instead got <tag>message</tag>, you can do the following:
:nnoremap <C-r> f<i") ?><Esc>F>a<? _("<Esc>
. Note that this time message should not contain < or >.

Answer 4

Regex
Vim is very capable of handling tasks like this with ease. Without a before and after example it's difficult to give you a precise solution, but I'll make a hypothetical one to demonstrate some of vim's power. Say you wanted to change any text inside a <span> tag to be executed by a PHP function. I might have a span tag like this:
<span>I need this text and all other span tags run through PHP!</span>
Probably the easiest way to get the job done is using regex. For example:
:%s/<span>\([^<]*\)<\/span>/<?= _("\1") ?>/g
This finds all span tags in the document and replaces them appropriately. You can even run this on multiple files (see :help bufdo). However, regex can be difficult for some people at first and many haven't taken the time to learn it well. Another option might look like this:
CTRL-R
/<span><cr>f>lct<<?= _("<C-r>"") ?><esc>
Step by step
/<span><cr> - search for opening span tags
f>l - move cursor to the character after the opening span tag
ct< - change the text until the next < character
<?= _("<C-r>"") ?> - put in what we want. The <C-r>" (as you referred to) will put in the contents of our unnamed register ", which in this case is the text we executed ct< on a minute ago.
<esc> - return to normal mode
Macro this
This might be useful to use as a macro. If so, just do the exact same thing with a macro around it...
qq/<span><cr>f>lct<<?= _("<C-r>"") ?><esc>q
Now you can execute #q to do the same thing to the next <span> tag. After you've used #q once you can also use ## or even 100#q to do it 100 times.