vim — How to read range of lines from a file into current buffer

Question

I want to read line n1->n2 from file foo.c into the current buffer.

I tried: 147,227r /path/to/foo/foo.c

But I get: \"E16: Invalid range\", though I

Answer 1

Other solutions posted are great for specific line numbers. It's often the case that you want to read from top or bottom of another file. In that case, reading the output of head or tail is very fast. For example -

:r !head -20 xyz.xml

Will read first 20 lines from xyz.xml into current buffer where the cursor is

:r !tail -10 xyz.xml 

Will read last 10 lines from xyz.xml into current buffer where the cursor is

The head and tail commands are extremely fast, therefore even combining them can be much faster than other approaches for very large files.

:r !head -700030 xyz.xml| tail -30

Will read line numbers from 700000 to 700030 from file xyz.xml into current buffer

This operation should complete instantly even for fairly large files.