Fun with Vimgolf 4: Transpositioning text with Tables

Here’s another vim challenge, and one you might actually encounter frequently in real life.

Transpose the original lines in separate columns, one for each line.

Link to challenge.

Simple, really; a transposition here, some alignment there… but can we do better than the good ole’ brute force approach the Vim guys will invariably use? Can we do it without a call to a shell commands like column and paste? (Psst.. yes we can! It’s Emacs!)

Here’s the original data:

ultricies, vehicula, felis, sed, auctor, aenean, euismod, semper, quam, dapibus
nibh, consequat, consequat, maecenas, sit, amet, mauris, justo, quis, porttitor
curabitur, pharetra, euismod, orci, sit, amet, ullamcorper, mi, tincidunt, et
vitae, lorem, at, mi, feugiat, convallis, ac, eget, dui, fusce
blandit, iaculis, nulla, sit, amet, dolor, nec, est, ornare, volutpat

… Standard comma-, and newline-delimited data, and we must turn it into this:

ultricies  nibh       curabitur    vitae      blandit
vehicula   consequat  pharetra     lorem      iaculis
felis      consequat  euismod      at         nulla
sed        maecenas   orci         mi         sit
auctor     sit        sit          feugiat    amet
aenean     amet       amet         convallis  dolor
euismod    mauris     ullamcorper  ac         nec
semper     justo      mi           eget       est
quam       quis       tincidunt    dui        ornare
dapibus    porttitor  et           fusce      volutpat

Looking into the challenge, I was already thinking “tables” – Emacs tables. Transposition is a common operation in tables (spreadsheets) and mathematics, and Emacs can do both very well indeed.

So here’s what I did, utilizing our old friend org-mode; or rather, one of its subsidiary libraries. You don’t have to be in org-mode for this trick to work. It echoes an earlier VimGolf challenge I did where I used its hierarchical “sort” function to sort an address book: Fun with Vimgolf 1: Alphabetize the Directory.

C-x h

Mark the whole buffer

M-x org-table-convert-region

Converts a region into an org table. The defaults use comma and new line separators by default. Bonus.

M-x org-table-transpose-table-at-point

As the name implies this will transpose our table as required by the Vimgolf challenge.

C-x C-x

Exchange point and mark.

M-x replace-regexp

Replace: ^| \\|| With: RET

Replace the pipe at the beginning of the line and a whitespace, or any pipe.

M-x delete-trailing-whitespace

Delete trailing whitespace. Could also be done with a more sophisticated regexp in the penultimate step.

Done right, and it should look like this:

ultricies nibh      curabitur   vitae     blandit
vehicula  consequat pharetra    lorem     iaculis
felis     consequat euismod     at        nulla
sed       maecenas  orci        mi        sit
auctor    sit       sit         feugiat   amet
aenean    amet      amet        convallis dolor
euismod   mauris    ullamcorper ac        nec
semper    justo     mi          eget      est
quam      quis      tincidunt   dui       ornare
dapibus   porttitor et          fusce     volutpat

Six “keystrokes” (for an arbitrarily large definition of “keystroke”…), but done the Emacs way. The best score on VimGolf is currently 31 (characters). Very impressive, but would it work on a 20x20 or with variable-length rows? “Think Abstract,” the developer cried.

The result above should be identical to that of the Vimgolf output, but done without the hyper-specialized and brittle solutions (most?) of the VimGolfers employ.

I didn’t tweak the cell width (whitespacing between each word) for each column; that it aligns perfectly with VimGolf’s output is dumb luck. Maybe they generated the resultant output in Emacs? :)

Nevertheless, the solution is “typical Emacs” and would scale well to very large datasets, and you don’t have to worry about things like unusually long cells; uneven number of rows and columns; etc.