Search for lines starting with given string in Vim?

Question

I have this code snippet:

# import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()
def foo():
    ...
    import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()
    ...
    # import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()

How should I specify search query, that it would find only the uncommented ipdb lines?

I guess the command could look something like: /import ipdb/(line start flag)

Answer 1

How about this:

/^[^#]*ipdb

The first ^ will anchor the match to the start of the line, [^#] will match any character except a # (the ^ means to match any character except those given), and the * repeats this 0 or more times.

See::help /^ :help /[ for some more information.

Note that this will match all lines with ipdb which don't start with a comment, including:

import other_module, ipdb

---

If you only want to match those starting with import ipdb, you can use:

/^\s*import ipdb

Here ^ will again anchor the match to the start of the line, \s will match any whitespace character, and * repeats this 0 or more times.