Search and replace in VIM results in trailing characters

Question

This is what I am attempting to do:

%s/Article/<h2>Article</h2>/gi

Unfortunately, every time i execute this command through my vim editor, it says:

Trailing characters

To mitigate the above, I executed the following:

%s/\s*\r*$//

And it executes successfully, but when I go back to the original search and replace command, it again reads 'Trailing characters' and does not execute the search and replace operation.

What am I doing wrong here?

Consider using \
to avoid replacing Articles
– johnny Jul 16 '11 at 07:55 — johnny, Jul 16 '11 at 07:55

score 57 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 16 '11 at 00:35

57

The "trailing characters" are in your command, not your document.

Vim thinks that you finished the command at Article</, then considers h2>/gi as the third argument of the substitute command. But those characters aren't all valid for the third argument, so it gives you the error.

To solve this, you need to escape the / character in your substitute.

%s/Article/<h2>Article<\/h2>/gi

answered Jul 16 '11 at 00:35

Merlyn Morgan-Graham

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12

You can use separators other than slash in `:substitute` command, so you don't have to escape `/` in the pattern (for example, `%s#Article#
Article
#gi`). – ib. Jul 16 '11 at 04:40

score 35 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 21 '11 at 21:19

Also, if you often need to use literal forward slashes in your regexs (XML/HTML/UNIX file paths) and don't want to worry about escaping every instance, you can use a different delimiter. For example, using ! instead of /:

%s!Article!<h2>Article</h2>!gi

I am lazy and this is usually easier than manually escaping slashes.

Search and replace in VIM results in trailing characters

2 Answers2

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