Somehow, I am required to alter the order of word in lines in a text file.

For example, the input text file is like below.

hello world
hello paul
this  is
for   test

I want this file be updated was below.

world hello
paul hello
is  this
test   for

Thanks to regular expression, I do not need to update the lines one after another.

The vim regular expression is a little different than the Perl's. But most of syntax are similar.

\w  : word charaters, includes both alphabet and number characters.

\s   : space characters.

*   : match zero or more preceding character or meta character like \s, \w.

The patterns can be grouped by enclosing with \( and \). 

& :  the whole matched pattern

\0:   the whole matched pattern

\1:   the matched pattern in the first pair of \( and \)

\2:   the matched pattern in the second pair of \( and \)

So, to accomplish the above task, the substitution regular expression is :

:%s/\(\w*\)\(\s*\)\(\w*\)/\3\2\1/

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