Is it possible to use find and replace on a wildcard string in VIM?

Question

For example, I have a bunch of values with a common prefix and postfix, such as:

fooVal1Bar;

fooVal2Bar;

fooVal3Bar;

In this case, all variable names begin and end with foo and end with Bar. I want to use a find and replace using the random variable names found between foo and Bar. Say I already have variables Val1, Val2, Val3, and Val1Old, Val2Old, and Val3Old Defined. I would do a find a replace, something along the lines of:

:%s/foo<AnyString>Bar/foo<AnyString>Bar = <AnyString> + <AnyString>Old

This would result in:

fooVal1Bar = Val1 + Val1Old;

fooVal2Bar = Val2 + Val2Old;

fooVal3Bar = Val3 + Val3Old;

I hope it's clear what I want to do, I couldn't find anything in vim help or online about replacing with wildcard strings. The most I could find was about searching for wildcard strings.

René Nyffenegger · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-26T15:40:03.070

68

I believe you want

:%s/foo\(\w\+\)Bar/& = \1 + \1\Old/

explanation:

\w\+ finds one or more occurences of a character. The preceeding foo and following Bar ensure that these matched characters are just between a foo and a Bar.

\(...\) stores this characters so that they can be used in the replace part of the substitution.

& copies what was matched

\1 is the string captured in the \(....\) part.

edited Apr 26 '12 at 15:40

answered Apr 26 '12 at 15:32

René Nyffenegger

39,402
33
158
293

is there a difference between the \w\+ and .*? – dwcanillas Apr 26 '12 at 15:48
9

`\w\+` matches one or more in this set: a-zA-Z0-9_ and `.*` matches zero or more of anything. – gpojd Apr 26 '12 at 15:51
Just tried it on the code I wanted to search and replace on, and it worked like a charm. thanks again! – dwcanillas Apr 26 '12 at 16:02
1

If you want to match a fixed number of occurrences you can use `\w\{n,m}` or `\w\{,m}` to match up to a max number of occurrences – storm_m2138 Aug 01 '18 at 19:19

score 9 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 14 '23 at 17:25

9

You need to capture what you want to save. Try something like this:

%s/\(foo\(\w\+\)Bar\);/\1 = \2 \2Old/

Or you can clean it up a little bit with \v magic:

%s/\v(foo(\w+)Bar);/\1 = \2 \2Old/

edited Jul 14 '23 at 17:25

Randall

2,859
1
21
24

answered Apr 26 '12 at 15:34

gpojd

22,558
8
42
71

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 25 '20 at 14:50

3

Replace string with wildcard

:%s/foo.*Bar/hello_world/gc

Here, .* handles wildcoard follows regex more info on regex quantifiers

. - Any character except line break
* - Zero or more times

answered Sep 25 '20 at 14:50

Daniel Selvan

959
10
23

Is it possible to use find and replace on a wildcard string in VIM?

3 Answers3