Replace ONE occurrence of something with MULTIPLE instances of something

Question

How can you replace one match with multiple instances of a character (like \t)?

It's no problem to replace multiple characters with one. But I did not find the answer for the opposite.

For example: I want to change

Items: item1 item2 item3 item4

to

Items:
                item1
                item2
                ...

and for the whitespace I want to use \t tabstop (for example). Something like:

:%s/\s\(item.\)/\r\t{5}\1/g

does not work.

Answer 1

• You are probably best off just hitting dat Tab key 5 times in your example:
  :%s/\s\(item.\)/\r    TabTabTabTabTab    \1/g
  _{(The tabs display as ^I in the Command-line.)}

• More elegantly, you can have vim repeat that typing for you. But with its ≥7 keystrokes and a bit of thinking effort, this technique is only economical for a bigger number of repetitions or characters to be repeated:
  :%s/\s\(item.\)/\r    Ctrl-f 5a \t Ctrl-c    \1/g

• The most literal and technical answer to your question is – at the cost of even much more verbose syntax – using \= for substituting by an expression [:help sub-replace-expression], in which you could then employ the repeat() function:
  :%s/\s\(item.\)/\= "\n" . repeat("\t", 5) . submatch(1)/g   _{(Readability spaces not required.)}

Unfortunately, vim does not provide syntactic sugar for repetition (\{5} or otherwise) in the replacement part of the :substitute command; almost none of the special regex syntax for pattern matching [:h pattern-overview] is available for the replacement: :h sub-replace-special

_{(PS: TabTabTabTabTabTabTabTabTabTabTabTabTabTabTab)}