Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Pattern-Matching Examples

Unless you are already familiar with regular expressions, the preceding discussion of special characters probably looks forbiddingly complex. A few more examples should make things clearer. In the examples that follow, a square (□) is used to mark a space; it is not a special character.

Let’s work through how you might use some special characters in a replacement. Suppose that you have a long file and that you want to substitute the word child with the word children throughout that file. You first save the edited buffer with :w, then try the global replacement:

:%s/child/children/g

When you continue editing, you notice occurrences of words such as childrenish. You have unintentionally matched the word childish. Returning to the last saved buffer with :e!, you now try:

:%s/child□/children□/g

(Note that there is a space after child.) But this command misses the occurrences child., child,, child: and so on. After some thought, you remember that brackets allow you to specify one character from among a list, so you realize a solution:

:%s/child[□,.;:!?]/children[□,.;:!?]/g

This searches for child followed by either a space (indicated by □) or any one of the punctuation characters ,.;:!?. You expect to replace this with children followed by the corresponding space or punctuation mark, but you’ve ended up with a bunch of punctuation marks after every occurrence of children. You need to save the space and punctuation marks inside a \( and \). Then you can “replay” them ...