Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 88

Meet the Substitute Command

The :substitute command is complex: in addition to providing a search pattern and replacement string, we have to specify the range over which it will execute. Optionally, we can also provide flags to tweak its behavior.

The substitute command allows us to find and replace one chunk of text with another. The command’s syntax looks like this:

:[range]s[ubstitute]/{pattern}/{string}/[flags]

The substitute command has many parts to it. The rules for the [range] are just the same as for every other Ex command, which we covered in-depth in Tip 28. As for the {pattern}, that was covered in Chapter 12, ​Matching Patterns and Literals​.

Tweak the Substitute Command Using Flags

We can tweak the behavior of the ...