How to search for any repeating character, X number of times

Question

Let's say a buffer has a certain characters I know will be repeated seven (7) times. How can I search for any character repeated seven times?

I know I can search for .., but those to characters won't necessarily be the same. There's also a special character (not sure if it's &) that can be used in substitutions to paste the found string in the replacement field, but I'm also not sure if that's useable again here.

EDIT: I'm specifically searching for merge conflict markers from git (<<<<<<<, =======, or >>>>>>> - possibly |||||||), but I'd like to know how to perform this search for any character X, repeating N times, so that I may reapply the knowledge in the future.

Thanks to @DJMcMayhem for the suggestion of vimregex.com; it lead me to search for /\v<<<<<|=====|>>>>> which caused an error, as each of those are special characters. Escaping those, however (/\v\<\<\<\<\<|\=\=\=\=\=|\>\>\>\>\>) did succeed in finding what I was looking for, in the short term. I'm still looking for a way to search for character X, repeating N times.

Answer 1

There's two different regex features that would be helpful. First off, you can use capturing groups. If you put something in parentheses, you can refer to whatever matched inside. So

/\(.\)\1

Will match any character (\(.\)) followed by that same character (Group 1, \1). You can also refer to groups in the replacement part of a substitute command.

The other feature is quantifiers.

• \{n,m} matches from n to m of the preceding characters...

• \{n} matches exactly n times of the preceding characters...

• \{,m} matches at most m (from 0 to m) of the preceding characters...

• \{n,} matches at least n of of the preceding characters...

putting it all together, you want to use:

/\(.\)\1\{6}

Or as the way I'd prefer it,

/\v(.)\1{6}

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I'd recommend reading through vimregex.com. It's a good tutorial on vim regex features.