Questions tagged [substitute]
Any operation involving regular expression based substitution of text, such as the ex-mode `:s` command. Not to be confused with the [replace] tag.
340
questions
76
votes
12
answers
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views
How to find and replace in Vim without having to type the original word?
I'd like to optimize my "find and replace" workflow in Vim. It's something I do often, as I'm sure most of you do too. Usually something along the lines of -- copy a block and change the name of a ...
- 833
55
votes
3
answers
175k
views
Find and replace using regular expressions
I have a file with a bunch of user defaults in. I want to change some of the text, but I'm struggling coming up with a matcher and replacer. Using the following example:
##############################...
- 875
47
votes
5
answers
21k
views
How to replace only within visual selection?
How does one get vim to replace a character within the visual selection only and not elsewhere on the line? Example:
Line: int arr[] = { 00 01 02 03 04 05 05 /* ... lots more like this*/};
Visual ...
- 1,083
29
votes
5
answers
14k
views
Can I do an interactive :substitute (search & replace)?
Sometimes I use :s with a complicated regexp which may or may not be correct, or I'm not sure if I want to replace all matches.
Is there any way I can tell Vim to confirm every match it finds before ...
- 61.3k
28
votes
1
answer
14k
views
How to edit files non-interactively (e.g. in pipeline)?
I would like to edit files passed in pipeline input using vim in non-interactive way or edit files in-place (similar to sed).
Few examples using sed:
$ sed -i'.bak' s/foo/test/g file # Edit file ...
- 18.2k
23
votes
1
answer
262
views
How does :g/^$/,/./-j (reduce multiple blank lines to a single blank) work in Vim?
In the article, Vim Regular Expressions, Oleg Raisky gives the following command to reduce multiple blank lines to a single blank:
:g/^$/,/./-j
Can someone please describe how this works?
I know :...
user579
22
votes
5
answers
20k
views
How to replace each match with incrementing counter?
I want to search and replace each occurrence of a certain pattern with a decimal number which begins at 1 and increments by one for each match.
I can find similarly worded questions that turn out not ...
- 703
20
votes
2
answers
6k
views
How can I repeat last substitution and with the same flags
& repeats the last :s
But it doesn't repeat with flags, e.g. a global sub:
:s/"/'/g
won't replace in the same way on consecutive lines with &, running :s/"/'/g on the first line here and ...
- 2,219
19
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Replace a string without changing case?
Due to a quirk in the domain-specific language I am working with, I frequently face the task of (selectively, not globally) replacing term or TERM with word or WORD, respectively.
This means, I ...
- 789
18
votes
3
answers
12k
views
Substitute with pure vimscript (without `:s`)
I have the following in my vimrc:
func! AddSpaceBeforeEqual()
s/\([a-z)_0-9"'\[\]]\)=/\1 =/ge
endfunc
I'm using vint to lint my vimrc, and got the following warning :
...
- 1,172
18
votes
1
answer
2k
views
What does it mean to replace slashes (/) by exclamation marks (!) in a substitute command?
I recently saw a substitute command where the author had the / replaced by a ! like this: :s!abc!ABC!g
I tried to find some documentation on this usage but I couldn't find anything relevant. So I ...
- 49.3k
18
votes
4
answers
2k
views
What is the rationale for \r and \n meaning different things in s command?
We all know that, when searching, \n is newline and \r is carriage return (^M), but when replacing \r is newline while \n is a null byte (^@).
What is the origin of this asymmetry? Given that this ...
- 283
17
votes
5
answers
2k
views
Replace a series of asterisk bullet points with a numbered list
Imagine I have the following text:
some random stuff
* asdf
* foo
* bar
some other random stuff
I want to replace the asterisk bullets with numbers, like so:
some random stuff
1. asdf
2. foo
3. bar
...
- 285
17
votes
2
answers
3k
views
Vim global substitution doesn't substitute all matches in a line
Sometimes my global substitutions don't substitute all matches in a line. It is confirmed by the fact that I can see it when I do substitutions with confirmation, a match is found in a line with ...
16
votes
5
answers
3k
views
How to run a substitute command on only a certain part of the line
I have the following line in my code:
INCORRECT_EMAIL_MOBILE_COMBINATION("incorrect_email_mobile_combination");
When I try to substitute the underscores with spaces in visual mode (using :'<,'>...
- 407
16
votes
3
answers
458
views
Can I make :s operate only on the last match of the line?
:s/pattern/replacement operates on the first match and
:s/pattern/replacement/g on all.
How to operate only on the last one?
- 3,119
16
votes
2
answers
665
views
Multiple choice substitute?
Normally, a substitute with the c option gives me two options: (y)es or (n)o. Is it possible to have several numbered yes options to choose from?
Example
File
person: Alice
dog: Tobby
person: Bob
...
- 263
15
votes
11
answers
16k
views
Substitute second occurence on line
I have a list of files:
./a.temp.txt ./a.temp.txt
./a/b.temp.txt ./a/b.temp.txt
./a/b/c.temp.txt ./a/b/c.temp.txt
And I want to remove the temp. on each line, but only the second occurence, ...
- 15.9k
15
votes
6
answers
5k
views
Delete all consecutive duplicates
I have a file that looks like this.
Move to 230.00
Hold
Hold
Hold
Hold
Hold
Hold
Move to 00.00
Hold
Hold
Hold
Hold
Hold
FooBar
Hold
Spam
Hold
I would like it to look like this:
Move to 230.00
...
- 17.4k
15
votes
2
answers
511
views
How can I run :substitute on only part of the line and not all of it?
I have a line like this one:
function my_function(argument, another argument, but there are spaces)
I want to substitute the space characters (inside the argument's names) with underscore. I thus ...
- 1,749
13
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Apply normal mode command to regex matches
I am using the following regular expression to match a documentation string underneath a Clojure function definition:
\vdefn.*\n\s*\zs"([^"]|\n)*"
Is there a way to run the normal mode gq (format ...
user489
11
votes
6
answers
2k
views
How to append some line at the end of the file only if it's not there yet?
I'd like to edit a file in-place by appending a line, only if doesn't exist yet to make my script bullet-proof.
Normally I'd do something like:
cat >> ~/.bashrc <<EOF
export PATH=~/....
- 18.2k
10
votes
3
answers
7k
views
What is the best way to re-factor a variable name in vim?
I know there is one way to search and replace variable occurrences across a source file.
But is there any better way by which if I rename a variable at one place it gets renamed at other places as ...
- 1,679
10
votes
4
answers
415
views
Restricting operations to a section of code
There is many times in my day to day work life that I need to operate on a specific function, things like highlighting or searching for a variable, but I have never managed to limit the scope of the ...
- 203
10
votes
1
answer
2k
views
How to substitute in multiple lines?
I'd like to insert a word in multiple lines, is there any command like
:[2,3,5,7,11]s/^/word\ /g
which would insert word at the beginning of line 2, line 3, line 5, line 7 and line 11?
Here, ...
- 1,451
10
votes
1
answer
3k
views
How to translate Unicode escape sequences to the Unicode character?
I have a file with a lot of characters represented like this: \u05E2. (These are the actual characters in the file: backslash, lowercase u, and four hexadecimal digits.) Due to that, the file is ...
- 2,429
10
votes
1
answer
2k
views
How can I execute multiple optional substitute commands in one line?
I am comparing a couple of files with vimdiff. There are some differences which I expect and which I'd like to get rid of. I know I can use:
:%s#from1#to1#g | %s#from2#to2#g | ...
to replace ...
- 265
10
votes
1
answer
2k
views
How to get a preview for the substitution command?
Quite often I find myself in need of performing a substitution that will have matches sparsed all over a large file and with non-trivial search and replacement expressions.
For example, say I have ...
- 305
9
votes
1
answer
358
views
Perform previous substitution for different selection with single keystroke
I performed following command
:'<,'>s/2/digit/g
on the code below manually visually selected:
return _.round(this.getTotalAbs(), 2).toFixed(2);
And it worked as intended
return _.round(...
- 1,679
8
votes
2
answers
218
views
Is there a shortcut to reuse the search term of the find and replace?
I think there is a distinct possibility this question has already been asked, but I can't find it.
If I am doing something like :s/foo/bar/g and then I want to call that again on the next line but ...
- 183
8
votes
2
answers
2k
views
How to use substitution on register?
Let say I've register which has string stored in it, but I'd like to use substitute command to change it.
For example I've 5x5 html table:
let @t='<table>'.repeat('<tr>'.repeat('<td&...
- 18.2k
8
votes
1
answer
22k
views
Find and replace all numbers with 0?
Is there a command to find and replace all instances of a number in a file with 0 (including decimal numbers like 1.7)?
- 391
8
votes
1
answer
5k
views
How to change last occurrence of the string in the line? [duplicate]
I've the following example line:
aa ... abc abc abc ... zz
I'm aware that :s/abc/ok/ will change the first occurrence of abc in the current line and adding g flag will change all of them.
How do I ...
- 18.2k
8
votes
1
answer
2k
views
How do I replace a character with its hex value?
I want to replace a character with its hex literal. For example before regex:
h
After regex:
0x68
I'm trying this:
s/\([a-z]\)/\=printf("%#02x", submatch(0))/
But this replaces it with
00
...
- 17.4k
7
votes
2
answers
524
views
What is the most efficient way to invert two words?
Let's say that I have a file containing several occurrences of the word foo and several
occurrences of the word bar.
I need to make all the words foo become bar and inversely all the words
bar become ...
- 49.3k
7
votes
2
answers
5k
views
How to repeat last action with movement?
Assume the content:
foo fnord bar;" >> /tmp/foo/derp
gnarf foo fnord bar;" >> /tmp/foo/derp
I want to jump to the " and delete to end of line and repeat that over the rest of lines.
Yet ...
- 2,957
7
votes
1
answer
4k
views
When substituting with :%s/old/new/g, does g flag have any effect?
While working through vimtutor, I tried a variant on
:%s/old/new/g
by leaving off the g flag
:%s/old/new
and expected the substitution to only occur once in the whole file. After all, this mirrors ...
- 227
7
votes
4
answers
7k
views
Replace with hex character
Given this file:
printf 'hello\x19world\n' > hello.txt
I can replace a hex character:
$ ex -sc '%s/\%x19/ /|x' hello.txt
$ od -c hello.txt
0000000 h e l l o w o r l d \n
...
- 1
7
votes
1
answer
1k
views
How to make substitute() use another magic mode?
The doc about the substitute function :h substitute() tells us:
[...] the matching with {pat} is always done like the 'magic' option is set [...]
That's cool but what if I need to use substitute() ...
- 49.3k
7
votes
3
answers
3k
views
regex: how to replace "\["?
I have this sample line in the buffer:
export PS1="\[${Cyan}\]$(((SHLVL>1)) && echo "${SHLVL}\[${IBlack}\].")\[${IGreen}\]\u\[${IBlack}\]@\[${Purple}\]\h\[${IYellow}\] \w \$ \[${Color_Off}\...
- 1,638
7
votes
1
answer
203
views
How to prevent stopping a macro on unsuccessful substitution?
I've been trying to record a rather simple macro with two substitutions. The whole macro is: dd"+pkdd:%s/\t/, /g
:%s/ \(kb\d\+\),/ \1.0,/g
"+y$
However, the second substitution is there to reformat ...
- 241
7
votes
1
answer
1k
views
Replace all occurrences in visual block selection but NOT all occurrences on line
I'm trying to figure out how to do a search and replace on a visual block selection that will replace all occurrences in the visual block selection without replacing all occurrences on the line.
What ...
Kevin Aud
7
votes
0
answers
373
views
In a regex, why aren't the multi + and {1,} always parsed exactly the same way?
From :h /\+:
\+ Matches 1 or more of the preceding atom, as many as possible.
And :h /\{:
\{n,} Matches at least n of the preceding atom, as many as possible
It seems the multi + and {1,} have ...
- 6,118
6
votes
5
answers
6k
views
Match any number of digits NOT followed by
I want to search for:
From start of the line, any number of white spaces followed by any
number of digits NOT followed by a dot.
And replace it with all that was searched and a dot. This is just ...
- 265
6
votes
3
answers
4k
views
Multiple search-replace operations on a selection
I have a LaTeX file with a bunch of commands of the form \label{<word>} where the <word> represents a string that contains special characters, namely á é í ó ú ý ð þ æ ö. I'm looking for a ...
- 217
6
votes
4
answers
10k
views
How to delete part of a line that does not match a pattern?
I'd like to remove everything apart of my pattern match.
For example I've the following line:
window.page4_callback(["here \"is\" some text"]);
and I'd like to leave the text only within the double ...
- 18.2k
6
votes
4
answers
644
views
How can I store a series of regular expression search and replace commands and run them later?
How can I store a series of search and replace statements so I can run them later in sequence?
Possibly after I have close and re-opened vim...
For instance I might run the following in sequence ...
- 3,457
6
votes
2
answers
5k
views
substitution in every other line
how do I search/substitute in every other line.
:s/pattern1/pattern2{2}/g
file looks like
1 pattern1 text
2 pattern1 text
3 pattern1 text
4 pattern1 text
Output file should look like
1 pattern1 ...
- 73
6
votes
2
answers
1k
views
Conditional substitution in VIM
Is there a way to set Negate in the substitution command? In other words how to substitute any character except | to - and all | to +. Example:
| some text | other text |
to
+-----------+----------...
- 336
6
votes
2
answers
16k
views
How to replace bracket in vim?
I have
"012-0738-32"],[ "4", "Beacon
I want
"012-0738-32"
"4", "Beacon
],[+ space replaced with \r
- 659