Vim:Regex
lastmod 2025-04-17created 2016-01-095 edits
Magic mode
- magic
- Only a few symbols such as
.,$, and*keep their special meaning. (default)
- nomagic
- All symbols except
$are interpreted literally.
- very magic
- Almost all symbols have a special meaning, and must be escaped to be interpreted literally.
- vary no magic
- All symbols are interpreted literally, and must be escaped to have a special meaning.
Substitute Command
For each line in the range replace a match of the pattern with the string where:
-
c- Confirm each substitution -
g- Replace all occurrences in the line (withoutg- only first). -
i- Ignore case for the pattern. -
I- Don't ignore case for the pattern.
Case conversion
-
&- The entire text matched by the pattern. -
\U- Convert all following characters to uppercase -
\u- Convert only the next character to uppercase -
\E- End conversion
Examples
-
:%s/pattern/\U&/g - Uppercase the entire matched text
-
:%s/\(pattern\)/\U\1/g - Convert only a specific matched group to uppercase
Global Command
Execute the Ex command cmd (default ":p") on the lines within [range] where pattern matches. If pattern is preceded with a ! - only where match does not occur.
Escaped characters or metacharacters
-
.- any character except new line -
\s- whitespace character -
\S- non-whitespace character -
\d- digit -
\D- non-digit -
\x- hex digit -
\X- non-hex digit -
\o- octal digit -
\O- non-octal digit -
\h- head of word character (a,b,c...z,A,B,C...Z and _) -
\H- non-head of word character -
\p- printable character -
\P- like\p, but excluding digits -
\w- word character -
\W- non-word character -
\a- alphabetic character -
\A- non-alphabetic character -
\l- lowercase character -
\L- non-lowercase character -
\u- uppercase character -
\U- non-uppercase character
To paste yanked text
Ctrl + r -> "
See also
Favorite site
- [Recommended] Vim Regular Expressions 101 1
References
-
Vim_Regular_Expressions_101.pdf ↩