Match everything before first occurrence of a character

Question

I want to find all the characters upto the first occurence of the character "/".

I tried using

/.\{-}\/

but this included every character upto the last occurrence.

for example,

test/path/to/something

matched "test/path/to/" but I want it to only match "test/"

Answer 1

It doesn't actually match test/path/to/ -- it matches three times: test/, path/ and to/. If you want to match only match the first one, the easiest way is to anchor the pattern to something, for example, beginning of line:

/^.\{-}\/

which works if you really want to match everything before. In practice, you might want to only match what is e.g. separated by whitespace:

/\s\zs\S\{-}\/

Answer 2

Vim has start and end anchors (\zs and \ze respectively) that you can use. In this case, the \ze anchor will help match what you're looking for:

foo\ze\/ matches the "foo" in "foo/bar/baz"

In this example, it stops the search the match after it finds "foo" followed by a "/" but does not include the "/" since we put the anchor before it.

You can read the help on the \ze anchor for more information:

\ze        Matches at any position, and sets the end of the match there: The
           previous char is the last char of the whole match. |/zero-width|
           Can be used multiple times, the last one encountered in a matching
           branch is used.

           Example: "end\ze\(if\|for\)" matches the "end" in "endif" and "endfor".
           This cannot be followed by a multi. |E888|