How to remove quotes surrounding the first two columns in Vim?

Question

Say I have the following style of lines in a text file:

\"12\" \"34\" \"some text     \"
\"56\" \"78\" \"some more text\"
.
.
.
etc.

I want

Answer 1

Control-V is used for block select. That would let you select things in the same character column.

It seems like you want to remove the quotes around the numbers. For that use,

:%s/"\([0-9]*\)"/\1/g

Here is a list of what patterns you can do with vim.

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There is one more (sort of ugly) form that will restrict to 4 replacements per line.

:%s/^\( *\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"\([ 0-9]*\)"/\1\2\3\4/g

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And, if you have sed handy, you can try these from the shell too.

head -4 filename.txt | sed 's/pattern/replacement/g'

that will try your command on the first 4 lines of the file.