Few proficient Perl programmers would choose your method, which is why you're not finding code already written to do this.

As others have said, Perl's editing features are powerful. It seems like the reason you're looking to use vim is that your proficiency with vim is greater than with Perl. If so, the correct approach is to improve your proficiency with Perl and edit your data using Perl instead of kludging something with vim.

If the data can be represented in a config format, there are many modules available to be used; just do a CPAN search on 'config'.

Even if your data isn't nicely represented in a config format, it's possible that CPAN may contain a module which will solve your problem without using an external editor.

In reply to Re^3: Piping data to vim by tod222
in thread Piping data to vim by yoda54

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.