How to surround visual block with quotes (or similar) in vim

Question

Given a visual block selection in Vim, how does one wrap quotes around it?

I often find myself with the objective to take a list of fields - such as

name
address
telephone

to transform it into something like this in my code

declare name      = 'name';
declare address   = 'address';
declare telephone = 'telephone';

I'm comfortable getting to the following stage with a series of visual block selects and changes, etc.

declare name      = 'name
declare address   = 'address
declare telephone = 'telephone

but how do I do the last part inserting the trailing quote and semi-colon in an efficient way? Having to do an ex-mode substitute here somehow feels wrong.

Edit: I recall Damian Conway demonstrating this here - "More Instantly Better Vim" - 37:00. It's hard to tell but is he taking advantage of something in the dragvisuals.vim plugin or something native to vim when he appends the last quotes?

Answer 1

Visual Block

You can use $ and A with visual block mode. You can probably use gv to restart the Visual block mode up again.

gv$A';<esc>

Substitution

Visually select your lines then do :s/$/';

Better Substitution

Forget doing the visual block business and other stuff. Just start with your list and do the following substitution:

:%s/.*/declare & = '&';/

You could do a visual range if you rather. If you want to keep indention at the beginning of the line do: :%s/^\s*\zs.*/declare & = '&'/

Sidebar: Alignment

You can use a the plugin, Tabular, to do alignment.

:Tabularize /\zs=

Other alignment plugins are: Align and vim-easy-align.

Conclusion

I prefer the "Better Substitution" method and followed by :Tabularize.

For more information see:

:h visual-block
:h blockwise-operators
:h v_b_A
:h v_b_A_example
:h gv
:h /\zs
:h :s/\&