How to match each occurrence per line?

Question

I have similar text on more lines:

_AB_ _ABC_ _ OR _ _A_ _ABC_

I need to replace only the underscores that delimit some text. So I need:

=AB= =ABC= _ OR _ =A= =ABC=

How to match each pattern?

Ralf · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-07 11:39:55Z

4

Try:

%s/_\([A-Za-z]\+\)_/=\1=/g

Where

[A-Za-z] matches the chars A-Z and a-z. You could add other chars between []. Note: If you want to add a dash (-), it has to be the first char after the opening [.
\+ means "one or more".

answered Feb 7, 2019 at 11:33

Ralf

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Note that you can replace [A-Za-z] with \a (or you could use \w to add [0-9]` too). See :h /character-classes
– statox
Commented Feb 7, 2019 at 12:38
2

@statox I knew \w, but that would also add the underscore. But \a is good (and I didn't knew it :-)).
– Ralf
Commented Feb 7, 2019 at 12:44
If you're looking for single-token representations of those don't forget the POSIX style character classes [:alpha:] and [:alnum:] e.g. /[[:alnum:]]. (Or do forget them...they're not particularly short and they're ASCII only. :)
– B Layer
Commented Feb 8, 2019 at 12:25

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