iabbrev starting with semicolon

Question

I want some abbreviations for common things typed in e-mails want to start them with a semicolon.

iabbrev ;ph 555123467

But this gives me an error:

E474: Invalid argument

I can have semicolon later in the abbreviation, but not as the first character. Is there a way to escape the semicolon or otherwise allow it as the first character in my abbreviation?

Answer 1

From :h abbreviations we can read:

There are three types of abbreviations:

full-id     The "full-id" type consists entirely of keyword characters (letters
            and characters from 'iskeyword' option).  This is the most common
            abbreviation.

            Examples: "foo", "g3", "-1"

end-id      The "end-id" type ends in a keyword character, but all the other
            characters are not keyword characters.

            Examples: "#i", "..f", "$/7"

non-id      The "non-id" type ends in a non-keyword character, the other
            characters may be of any type, excluding space and tab.  {this type
            is not supported by Vi}

            Examples: "def#", "4/7$"

So it seems that the only solution is to add ; to iskeyword with set iskeyword+=;, note that it might not be the best solution since it will change the behavior of a lot of other things (see :h 'iskeyword')

So personally I would recommend not to use abbreviations beginning with ; or setting ; as a part of iskeyword but only on filetype-specific configurations.

Another solution is to create a "non-id" abbrev and simply add another ; at the end of the left hand part like this:

iabbrev ;ph; 555123467