Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 85

Create Complex Patterns by Iterating upon Search History

Writing regular expressions is hard. We won’t get it right the first time, so the next best thing is to develop a frictionless workflow that allows us to develop a pattern by iteration. Being able to recall and edit previous items from our search history is the trick.

In this example text, the prime symbol has been used as a quote mark:

search/quoted-strings.txt

This string contains a 'quoted' word.
This string contains 'two' quoted 'words.'
This 'string doesn't make things easy.'

We want to compose a regular expression to match each quoted string. This will take a few tries, but when we get it right, we’ll run a substitute command to transform the text to use real double-quote ...