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Practical Vim
book

Practical Vim

by Drew Neil
October 2012
346 pages
7h 40m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Practical Vim
Tip 75Use Parentheses to Capture Submatches

When specifying a pattern, we can capture submatches and then reference them elsewhere. This feature is especially useful in combination with the substitute command, but it can also be used to define patterns where a word is repeated.

Take this excerpt of text:

patterns/springtime.txt
 
I love Paris in the
 
the springtime.

Can you spot the grammatical error? It’s surprisingly hard to see because of a trick that our mind plays on us, but it should pop out with emphasis: “Paris in the the springtime.” When a line break separates two occurrences of the same word, our brain tends to ignore the duplicate. The effect is called a lexical illusion.[20]

Here’s a regular expression that matches duplicate ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781941222805Errata