Vim: sourcing based on a string

Question

I can\'t seem to find an answer to this in any of the numerous Vim scripting tutorials online. What I want to do is construct a file name of a script from environment varia

Answer 1

You can build up a string and then use the execute command:

exec "source " . $HOME . "/.vim/myscript_" . l:foo . ".vim"

(The l:foo here is an example of using a local variable from within a function.)

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Edit:

But in fact exec is overkill in this specific case. As rampion shows here, the OPs task can be done directly with:

source $HOME/.vim/myscript_$FOO.vim

Although vim does not let us wrap the variable names neatly in ${...} like we could in the shell, in this case we are lucky that HOME is terminated by the / and FOO by the .

In general, exec would be needed if you wanted to follow one of the variables by a non-terminating character. For example:

exec "source " . $BAR . "_script.vim"

would insert the BAR variable, while the following would try to find a variable called BAR_script:

source $BAR_script.vim       " Possibly not what you wanted!

Use shellescape() for safety

When adding a variable to a string to be executed, we should really use shellescape() to escape strange chars (for example spaces in filenames).

For example, these are safer versions of the above:

exec "source " . shellescape($HOME . "/.vim/myscript_" . l:foo) . ".vim"

exec "source " . shellescape($BAR) . "_script.vim"