Search and replace method?

Question

Got a small search and replace question. Say you have some text:

(1, 'car', 'http://cara', 'test'),
(2, 'car', 'http://cara', 'test'),
(3, 'car', 'http://cara', 'test'),

I want to replace all the id columns (numbers) with null, such as:

(, 'car', 'http://cara', 'test'),
(, 'car', 'http://cara', 'test'),
(, 'car', 'http://cara', 'test'),

How would one go about it? Anyone know how to do this in bbedit, textwrangler? Any other tools out there?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use a regex in vim to handle your search and replace:

%s/(\S\{-},/(, replaces the first instance of "(foo," with "(," in a given line

Answer 2

You can use vim's visual selection: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Cut/copy_and_paste_using_visual_selection