Perform change to all occurrences of multi-line selection

Question

Scenario

I would like to perform the following,

1. Visually select some text that spans multiple lines and occurs multiple times in the file: V
2. Yank to buffer: y
3. Perform substitute with text from buffer: (:%s,<Ctrl-r> 0,new text,g)

Example

Given the following example:

metadata:
  name: redis
spec:
  version: 5.0
...
metadata:
  name: redis

I want to change all occurrences of metadata.

Output: :%s,metadata:^M name: redis,some other text,g

Error: E486: Pattern not found: metadata:^M name: redis

Answer 1

You can use vim-visual-multi. Use multi line mode with \\M. Select all occurrences with \\A and do c to change.

Other people will tell you the vim way.

You can also use %s/pattern\n nextline/something/ (or ^v<enter> instead of \n - would surely work ).

Answer 2

The problem is that the characters used to represent newlines in a buffer are not the same as those needed to match a newline in a regular expression. As eyal kami suggests, you can fix this by manually replacing the Ctrl-M ^M characters in your substitution with \n, or, perhaps cleaner, you could write a function to do both steps 2 and 3 for you:

function! MultiLineSubstitute() abort
  normal!gvy
  let expression = substitute(@0, "\<C-J>", '\\n', 'g')
  execute '%s,'.expression.','.input("Replacement: ")
endfunction

vnoremap <F1> :<C-U>call MultiLineSubstitute()<CR>

Note however that new lines are far from the only character that has a different meaning in a regular expression. You might want to look into the very nomagic atom (:help /\V) and the escape() function to work around this.