Remove markers both with or without a leading comment character

Question

I use Vim with marker folding for my work and the presence of all the fold markers annoys my colleagues, so I want a quick and easy way to cleanly remove them all from my files. Closing markers are easy, as I make sure they are always on their own line, preceded by varying amount of whitespace, so

:%s/^\s*# }}}\n//g

works fine.

Opening markers are a bit more of a problem as they can take one of two forms, either at the end of a comment (eg # IMPORTS {{{) or at the end of a block definition (eg def fn(): # {{{). I can deal with these two individually with

:%s/ {{{//g
:%s/  # {{{/g

but when I try to combine the two, I cannot get it to work. I have tried

:%s/( |  # ){{{)\\g
:%s/(  # {{{| {{{)\\g

both with and without an initial '^.*' before the parentheses but it didn't work (yes, I know that would have deleted the entire line, but I was hoping it would at least point me in the right direction). I've even tried escaping the various # and { characters out of sheer desperation, not expecting that to work since they don't need escaping in the individual substitutions, but regardless of what I try, all I get is a 'pattern not found' error. I've tried Googling, with no luck - all the answers I've found seem to say I'm doing it right, but I'm obviously misunderstanding them

It's not a major hassle having to use three instructions, especially as I plan to put this into a function, but I just want to know, what is the correct method of searching for and deleting either of the two patterns in one go?

Answer 1

You're not properly escaping your special characters.

You should either escape parentheses and the pipe or use very magic mode but then you'd have to escape the curly braces. See :help /magic.

1. Escape parens and pipe

   :%s/\(\|#\) {{{//
   

2. Use very magic mode

   :%s/\v(|#)\s*\{\{\{//
   

3. Or just forget about the OR operator in favor of the \? (zero or one) quantifier. I threw in some \s* to also match any number of white space.

   :%s/\s*\(#\s*\)\?{{{//
   

In general, :help pattern is recommended reading.

One more thing, if it's not already on, consider :set incsearch. This will highlight matches while you type your pattern. If the highlight goes away, you know exactly where you mistyped.