Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 79

Escape Problem Characters

The \V literal switch makes it easier to search for text verbatim because it disables the special meanings for the ., +, and * symbols, but there are a few characters whose special meaning can’t be turned off. In this advanced tip, we’ll look at how to handle these.

Escape / Characters When Searching Forward

Take this excerpt from a Markdown document:

patterns/search-url.markdown

Search items: [http://vimdoc.net/search?q=/\\][s]
...
[s]: http://vimdoc.net/search?q=/\\

Suppose that we want to search for all instances of the URL http://vimdoc.net/search?q=/\\. Rather than typing it out in full, we’ll just yank it into a register so that we can paste it into our search field. We want to match this text exactly ...