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Regex substitutions
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When using regexes to perform substitutions in VIM you might have noticed that they quickly become unreadable. You have
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to escape almost every special character.
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If you, like me, prefer to use extended regular expressions you can start your substitutions with \v to enable something
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called "very magic" mode. That means that all ASCII characters expect 0-9, a-z, A-Z and _ have special meaning.
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As an example lets just use a regex group to quote the first 4 consecutive characters on every line:
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:%s/\v([a-z]{4})/"\1"10
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Here is an example of what that looks like in my current buffer:
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VIM substitution using regex
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Unfortunately, there isn't a setting to enable very magic mode by default.
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The end
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I usually tweet something when I've finished writing a new post. You can find me on Twitter
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by clickingÂ