Sublime Workflow for replacing quotes

Question

I use text editor Sublime Text 3 to edit code, and very often I'll have a string literal wrapped in double quotes, that I want to change to single quotes, or vise versa. Right now I scroll to each quotation mark, and replace it with the one I want. Is there a faster workflow for this? Say, highlighting the word or a hotkey or something? I would find it super useful.

Answer 1

If you have a large number of such strings in a file and you want to convert all of them at once, you could use a regex find/replace operation to find and replace them all. You would use Find > Replace... or Find > Find in files... to search for a matching regex that captures the text in the quotes.

For example you could use \"([^"\n]*)\" as a search term and '\1' as the replacement text to swap all double quoted strings for single quotes.

You can't bind something like that to a key directly because Find/Replace can't be used in a Macro, but you could use the RegReplace package to do this if you want to go that route.

You can potentially speed up the workflow that you're currently using by taking advantage of multiple cursors, if you're not already doing that.

You could for example select the first quote, then press Ctrl+D or Option+D to select the other one. Now that you have two cursors, press Backspace to delete both quotes and press the new quote character to insert the new ones.

This can't be macro-ized and bound to a key because the find_under_expand command can't be used in a macro, though.

For a full key press solution, as far as I'm aware you would need a plugin of some sort to do this for you. One such example appears to be ChangeQuotes, although I've never personally used it.

It's also possible to write your own small plugin such as the following:

import sublime
import sublime_plugin


class SwapQuotesCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):
    pairs = ["'", '"']

    def run(self, edit):
        self.view.run_command("expand_selection", {"to": "scope"})
        for sel in self.view.sel():
            self.toggle(edit, sel)

    def toggle(self, edit, region):
        begin = self.view.substr(region.begin())
        end = self.view.substr(region.end() - 1)

        if begin == end and begin in self.pairs:
            index = self.pairs.index(begin) + 1
            new = self.pairs[index % len(self.pairs)]

            for point in (region.begin(), region.end() - 1):
                self.view.replace(edit, sublime.Region(point, point+1), new)

This expands the selection in all of the cursors out by the current scope, and then if both ends of the selection are a matching quote, the quote in use is swapped.

In use, you would use a key binding such as the following, which includes a context to make the key only trigger while the cursor is inside of a string so that it doesn't mess up your selection in cases where it definitely won't work.

{
    "keys": ["ctrl+shift+'"], "command": "swap_quotes",
    "context": [
        { "key": "selector", "operator": "equal", "operand": "string.quoted", "match_all": true }
    ]
},