Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 90

Eyeball Each Substitution

Finding all occurrences of a pattern and blindly replacing them with something else won’t always work. Sometimes we need to look at each match and decide if it should be substituted. The c flag modifies the :substitute command to make this possible.

Remember this example from Tip 5?

the_vim_way/1_copy_content.txt

...We're waiting for content before the site can go live...
...If you are content with this, let's go ahead with it...
...We'll launch as soon as we have the content...

We couldn’t use find and replace to change “content” to “copy.” Instead, we used the Dot Formula to solve our problem. However, we could also have used the c flag on the substitute command:

:%s/content/copy/gc

The c flag ...