Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 78

Stake the Boundaries of a Match

Sometimes we might want to specify a broad pattern and then focus on a subset of the match. Vim’s \zs and \ze items allow us to do just that.

Up until now, we’ve assumed a complete overlap between search patterns and the matches they generate. It’s time to pry these apart into two separate concepts. Let’s start by defining them. When we talk of a pattern, we refer to the regular expression (or literal text) that we type into the search field. When we talk of a match, we refer to any text in the document that appears highlighted (assuming the ‘hlsearch’ option is enabled).

The boundaries of a match normally correspond to the start and end of a pattern. But we can use the \zs and \ze items to crop the ...