Vimscript: how to get current filetype as a variable

Question

I\'d like to get the current filetype as a variable in vimscript.

I\'m making a function that grabs the current filetype and edits another file of corresponding filety

Answer 1

You can access the value of a setting by prefixing it with an ampersand. To assign the filetype to a variable, the following are equivalent:

let my_filetype = &filetype
let my_filetype = &ft

So for your example, assuming the filetype of the current buffer has been set, you could do something like

execute 'edit tmp/other.' . &filetype

Note that you need to execute the expression so that the variable is expanded before the strings are concatenated.

Answer 2

File type and file suffix are not necessarily the same thing. For example, if you are editing a .txt file, let zft = &ft sets zft to "text". let zfs = fnamemodify(bufname("%"), ":e") sets zfs to "txt".