Deleting spaces at the beginning of lines in vim

Sometimes I'll copy the text from a web page and paste it into a local text file so that I can manipulate it, search through it, etc. But when pasted into the text file it sometimes gets mis-formatted, with a bunch of spaces preceding some lines, such as this

Ampan Victor Speech 6698 Anderson Mike Orchestra 6660 Anderson Bob Pupil Support 6668 Bancroft Mark Grade 4 6672 Hartee Jeanette Pupil Support 6680 Henshoof Harry Building PC/LAN Tech 6705 7130 Herg Sara Social Worker 6676 Looks Dean Pupil Support 6673 Murkstrand Lance Special Education 6673 7171

To eliminate those spaces in vim (may or may not work in vi, depending on version), use this command:

:%s/^\s\+//
Translation:

% - Apply the command to all lines (same as 1,G)
s - substitute what's between slash one and two with what's between
slash two and three.  In this case, there's nothing between slash two and
three, so nothing is substituted, effectively deleting what's between slashes
one and two.
^ - The caret means starting at the beginning of the line
\s - This is a metacharacter meaning white space, e.g., a space or a tab
\+ - Another metacharacter meaning one or more of the preceding characters;
without this, only the first space or tab at the beginning of the line would be 
selected and deleted.


10/27/2006