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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.

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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}

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

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  • This didn't seem to work (either with or without that final ` that seems to be optional). I am searching for git diff indicators, which are <<<<<<<, =======, or >>>>>>>. {I believe |||||||` is also used if it is a three-way merge, but don't know for sure.} Your suggestion of vimregex.com was valuable though; see my updated question. – user3.1415927 Mar 23 '19 at 2:58
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    @user3.1415927 I'm not sure what to tell you. /\(.\)\1\{6} will definitely match any one character repeated 7 times, so there must be something else at play. And I did answer the question "How do I search for a character repeated N times": use \{n} Also your example regex doesn't seem right, each character is repeated only 5 times. – James Mar 23 '19 at 4:31
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    To add to that, your regex could be a lot cleaner if you used the quantifiers I mentioned. For example, /\v\<{7}|\={7}|\>{7} (or {5} if you want something equivalent to the one you posted) – James Mar 23 '19 at 4:34

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