VI Editor - A great tool for testing Regular Expressions

VI is one of the fastest and most successful editor used by the unix users. VI can also boast of having a regular expression search feature which I found amongst easiest to use and easy to test your regular expressions as well

Consider the file pom.xml below. We are going to demonstrate a step by step way of selecting only line numbers in the file and finally performing a search and replace to remove all the leading line numbers from the text

1 <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 2   xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
 3   <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
 4   <groupId>com.examples.spring</groupId>
 5   <artifactId>HelloSpring</artifactId>
 6   <packaging>jar</packaging>
 7   <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
 8   <name>HelloSpring</name>
 9   <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
10   <dependencies>
11     <dependency>
12       <groupId>junit</groupId>
13       <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
14       <version>3.8.1</version>
15       <scope>test</scope>
16     </dependency>
17   </dependencies>
18 </project>

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