How can I convert spaces to tabs in Vim or Linux

Question

I ve looked over several questions on Stack Overflow for how to convert spaces to tabs without finding what I need  There seem to be more questions about how to convert tabs to spaces  but I m trying to do the opposite   In Vim I ve tried  retab and  retab  without luck  but I believe those are actually for going from tabs to spaces anyways   I tried both expand and unexpand at the command prompt without any luck   Here is the file in question   http   gdata-python-client googlecode com hg-history a9ed9edefd61a0ba0e18c43e448472051821003a samples docs docs v3 example py  How can I convert leading spaces to tabs using either Vim or the shell

User · Answer

Simple Python Script   import os  SOURCE ROOT    ROOT DIRECTORY - WILL CONVERT ALL UNDERNEATH   for root  dirs  files in os walk SOURCE ROOT       for f in files          fpath   os path join root f          assert os path exists fpath          data   open fpath   r   read           data   data replace           t           outfile   open fpath   w           outfile write data          outfile close

User · Answer

1 - If you have spaces and want tabs  First  you need to decide how many spaces will have a single tab  That said  suppose you have lines with leading 4 spaces  or 8    Than you realize you probably want a tab to be 4 spaces  Now with that info  you do   set ts 4  set noet   retab   There is a problem here  This sequence of commands will look for all your text  not only spaces in the begin of the line  That mean a string like   quot Hey  this    is 4 spaces quot  will become  quot Hey  this is 4 spaces quot   but its not  its a tab   To settle this little problem I recomend a search  instead of retab    s     I         1 I g  This search will look in the whole file for any lines starting with whatever number of tabs  followed by 4 spaces  and substitute it for whatever number of tabs it found plus one  This  unfortunately  will not run at once  At first  the file will have lines starting with spaces  The search will then convert only the first 4 spaces to a tab  and let the following    You need to repeat the command  How many times  Until you get a pattern not found  I cannot think of a way to automatize the process yet  But if you do   10     You are probably done  This command repeats the last search replace for 10 times  Its not likely your program will have so many indents  If it has  just repeat again     Now  just to complete the answer  I know you asked for the opposite  but you never know when you need to undo things  2 - You have tabs and want spaces  First  decide how many spaces you want your tabs to be converted to  Lets say you want each tab to be 2 spaces  You then do   set ts 2  set et   retab   This would have the same problem with strings  But as its better programming style to not use hard tabs inside strings  you actually are doing a good thing here  If you really need a tab inside a string  use  t

User · Answer

s     s      lt        t g   Translation  Search for every instance of 4 consecutive spaces  after the   character   but only if the entire line up to that point is whitespace  this uses the zero-width look-behind assertion     lt     Replace each found instance with a tab character

User · Answer

Using Vim to expand all leading spaces  wider than  tabstop    you were right to use retab but first ensure  expandtab  is reset   verbose set ts  et  is your friend   retab takes a range  so I usually specify   to mean  the whole file     set tabstop 2        To match the sample file  set noexpandtab      Use tabs  not spaces   retab               Retabulate the whole file   Before doing anything like this  particularly with Python files    I usually set  list   so that I can see the whitespace and change    I have the following mapping in my  vimrc for this   nnoremap     lt F2 gt    lt C-U gt setlocal lcs tab  gt - trail - eol   list  list   lt CR gt

User · Answer

If you have GNU coreutils installed  consider   unexpand --first-only or for 4-space tabs  consider   unexpand -t 4 --first-only  --first-only is present just in case you were accidentally invoking unexpand with --all     Note that this will only replace the spaces preceding the prescribed tab stops  not the spaces that follow them  you will see no visual difference in vim unless you display tabs more literally  for example  my    vimrc contains set list listchars tab     I suspect this is why you thought unexpand didn t work

User · Answer

Linux  with unexpand  and expand   Here is a very good solution  https   stackoverflow com a 11094620 1115187  mostly because it uses  nix-utilities    unexpand     spaces -  tabs expand     tabs -  spaces   Linux  custom script  My original answer  Bash snippet for replacing 4-spaces indentation  there are two  4  in script  with tabs in all  py files in the   app folder  recursively    find   app -iname    py  -type f       -exec awk -i inplace          match  0        4             arr   gsub    4      t   arr 1        print arr 1  arr 3              It doesn t modify 4-spaces in the middle or at the end   Was tested under Ubuntu 16 0x and Linux Mint 18

User · Answer

Changes all spaces to tab   s  s  t g

User · Answer

To use Vim to retab a set of files  e g  all the   ts files in a directory hierarchy  from say 2 spaces to 4 spaces you can try this from the command line   find   -name    ts  -print0   xargs -0 -n1 vim -e   set ts 2 noet   retab    set ts 4 et   retab   wq    What this is doing is using find to pass all the matching files to xargs  the -print0 option on find works with the -0 option to xargs in order to handle files w  spaces in the name    xargs runs vim in ex mode  -e  on each file executing the given ex command which is actually several commands  to change the existing leading spaces to tabs  resetting the tab stop and changing the tabs back to spaces and finally saving and exiting   Running in ex mode prevents this  Vim  Warning  Input is not from a terminal for each file

User · Answer

In my case  I had multiple spaces fields were separated by one or more space  that I wanted to replace with a tab  The following did it       s  s    t g

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