Mastering Vim

Special regex characters

Let's dig deeper into regex:

Symbol	Meaning
.	Any character, except for end of the line
^	The beginning of the line
$	The end of the line
\_.	Any character, including end of the line
\<	The beginning of a word
\>	The end of a word

You can see the full list of these using :help ordinary-atom.

There are also what Vim calls character classes:

Symbol	Meaning
\s	Whitespace (Tab and Space)
\d	A digit
\w	A word character (digits, numbers or underscores)
\l	A lowercase character
\u	An uppercase character
\a	An alphabetic character

These classes have the opposite effect when capitalized; for example, \D matches all non-digit characters, ...