Feed keys visual mode and pressing enter?

Question

I'm running the following command, but the \<CR> becomes part of the regular expression in feedkeys...

:call feedkeys("0v/\(,\|$\)\<CR>")

Is there a way to make it an enter keypress instead?

Answer 1

The problem is that the backslashes are picked up by the double-quoted string in the feedkeys() command. You'll need to use \\ if you want to pass literal backslashes:

:call feedkeys("0v/\\(,\\|$\\)\<CR>")

This command suffers from a mild case of leaning toothpick syndrome. You can make it a bit simpler by adding \\v so that you don't need to add so many backslashes in the first place:

:call feedkeys("0v/\\v(,|$)\<CR>")

For single quotes strings no backslashes have a special meaning, so you could also use:

:call feedkeys('0v/\(,\|$\)' . "\<CR>")

or:

:call feedkeys('0v/\(,\|$\)^[')

Where ^[ is the literal Enter character (you can enter this by pressing <C-v><Enter>, it should show up in a different colour).