Sorting words (not lines) in VIM

Question

The built-in VIM :sort command sorts lines of text. I want to sort words in a single line, e.g. transform the line

b a d c e f

Answer 1

:!perl -ne '$,=" ";print sort split /\s+/'

Not sure if it requires explanation, but if yes:

perl -ne ''

runs whatever is within '' for every line in input - putting the line in default variable $_.

$,=" ";

Sets list output separator to space. For example:

=> perl -e 'print 1,2,3'
123

=> perl -e '$,=" ";print 1,2,3'
1 2 3

=> perl -e '$,=", ";print 1,2,3'
1, 2, 3

Pretty simple.

print sort split /\s+/

Is shortened version of:

print( sort( split( /\s+/, $_ ) ) )

($_ at the end is default variable).

split - splits $_ to array using given regexp, sort sorts given list, print - prints it.