How to replace inner text with yanked text

Question

An editing pattern I frequently run into is the following: I want to yank a piece of text inside quotes or brackets, and replace that piece of text inside another pair of quotes/brackets.

For example, if I want to copy the the class name foo bar and paste that somewhere else:

<span class="foo bar">

<div class="this-should-be-replaced-with-foo-and-bar">

What I know is this: If I move inside the span's class, I use yi" to yank the text inside the quotes.

Now I have this in my register, so I should be able to replace the class content of the div with it. But I can't find a handy way of doing this.

If I use ciw this ends up overwriting my register with content to change, so I loose my yanked text.

The best thing I can come up with is moving to the first quote of the div's class, hitting p, then deleting to the next quote with dt".

Usually I screw up my position though, and I paste it somewhere inside the quotes merging the two strings, and it is messing things up.

I'm hoping there's some way to do a "replace the inner text with my yanked content please" combination to make this easier.

Answer 1

You can use vi"p when inside "". This can replace text in yank register, so it matters when you want to use original yanked text more than once.

EDIT: Additional info from Octaviour comment regarding making it reusable more than once:

In order to do that I would yank to a named register, which makes the two commands: "ayi" and and vi""ap if you use register a.

Answer 2

You can use the numbered register. First yank "foo-bar" with yi", which will fill the "0 register, see :h "0. Then do ci"<c-r>0 to replace with the content of the register 0.

See :h i_CTRL-R for a description of the last part.

Answer 3

Here is another solution. It's not the best in term of Vimgolf, but it uses the black hole register:

Once you're on the foo bar string you can yank it normally using yi".

Then inside the brackets to change: "_di"P

Which is:

"_       We will use the black hole register
di"      Delete the inner brackets and put the deleted text in the black hole register
P        Put the previously yanked text

The advantage of the black hole register is that it will not mess your others registers. See :h quote_ for more details.

(Note that this answer is only here to talk about the black out register. I personally use visual selection as suggested by @grodzik.)

Answer 4

I need this so often, I wrote a plugin to simplify and allow maximum speed: ReplaceWithRegister.

This plugin offers a two-in-one gr command that replaces text covered by a {motion} / text object, entire line(s) or the current selection with the contents of a register; the old text is deleted into the black-hole register, i.e. it's gone. It transparently handles many corner cases and allows for a quick repeat via the standard . command. Should you not like it, its page has links to alternatives.