When you paste a block of text into a Putty window, many times you’ll get an increasing number of leading tabs. Not so if you use gnome-terminal (IIRC). Quite annoying in a Windows world.
Strip tabs and spaces out from current position to the end of the file with:

:.,$s/^[<tab>]*\s*//

Or perhaps you only want a […]

On a slashdot thread I was discussing whether I should roll my own data structure or try to use one of the many, many Sun data structures.
Someone recommended this book.