Tip #31: Find and Replace

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created: March 7, 2001 5:49 complexity: basic

author: Anonymous as of Vim: 5.7

To find and replace one or more occurences of a given text pattern with a new text string, use the s[ubstitute] command. There are a variety of options, but these are what you most probably want: :%s/foo/bar/g find each occurance of 'foo' and replace it with 'bar' without asking for confirmation :%s/foo/bar/gc find each occurance of 'foo' and replace it with 'bar' asking for confirmation first :%s/<foo>/bar/gc find (match exact word only) and replace each occurance of 'foo' with 'bar' :%s/foo/bar/gci find (case insensitive) and replace each occurance of 'foo' with 'bar' :%s/foo/bar/gcI find (case sensitive) and replace each occurance of 'foo' with 'bar' NB: Without the 'g' flag, replacement occurs only for the first occurrence in each line. For a full description and some more interesting examples of the substitute command refer to :help substitute See also: :help cmdline-ranges :help pattern :help gdefault

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Additional Notes

[email protected], May 30, 2001 1:57

To match exact words only you need \<foo\>, not <foo>.

Anonymous, November 25, 2002 5:22

To find or replace line breaks or tab characters, use Ctrl-v followed by the enter or tab key.

[email protected] - NOSPAM, October 12, 2004 13:24

As an alternative to embedding control characters into your searches and substitutes: tabs ~ \t newline ~ \n when searching or on the left-hand-side of a substitute newline ~ \r when inserting a newline with a substitute (right-hand-side)

Anonymous, February 15, 2005 11:59

VIMs find and replace also supports wild carding with '*'

[email protected], May 18, 2005 15:26

How do I find and replace all commas with a new line? :%s/,/\n/gc # places control characters in, as does :%s/,/~ \n/gc How do you insert the actual newline?

Anonymous, May 26, 2005 4:27

to bwiese: try :s%/,/\r/gc instead...

Anonymous, June 17, 2005 23:32

to bwise you have to type C-v C-n to get the actual newline.

[email protected], July 22, 2005 4:48

thanks! that did it: ":%s/,/\r/gc" and also using "Ctrl-v Ctrl-m" to get the "^M" for the replace string in ":%s/,/^M/gc" (posted to correct minor typos)

[email protected], October 7, 2005 6:09

How do i search and replace all the occurance of < with < , > with >, " with ", & with &, etc.. Basically i want to convert(un-escape) these xml escaped file by one key stroke. Prabably i want to write a map which will call a function which does all the substitutions at once for a complete file.

[email protected], November 15, 2005 0:05

Extra question conserning replacing , by newlines: I'm used to Ctrl-V Ctrl-M, but in gvim on windows Ctrl-V just pastes the clipboard on the after the :%s/ I tried unmap <C-V>: this disables C-V = paste *except* when in edit-mode or after a colon Any other ideas to make Ctrl-V Ctrl-M work in gvim on windows are very welcome

[email protected], December 7, 2005 1:50

I found :1,$s/,/\r/g worked fine. Can't get the usual Unix "^v ^M" to work though. But at least the \r works :)

[email protected], January 2, 2006 22:48

To karel In gvim on windows , you can also use "Ctrl-Q" to replace "Ctrl-V".

[email protected], February 17, 2006 8:29

How can I search & replace a case-insensitive pattern and replace with a corresponding case-sensitive target. For example, if I have the text "Hello hello HELLO" what command can I issue to change it to "Goodbye goodbye GOODBYE"? Note that the relative positioning of lowercase and uppercase characters are identical in the original and modified text. Perhaps I can't use the substitute command for this.

[email protected], February 28, 2006 3:22

Seems like I am a little bit blind today. I read about five good PDF's about working with vim and read also a lot of sites in the net... But I can't find the way, how to search and replace an expression like http://www.somewhat.com/somwhere etc. How do I find patterns with slashs??? I get "E488: Trailing charakters" or "The pattern http:\/\/www.subjektiv-news.de\/index could not be found" ... I will go on searching, but if someone knows the answer - please mail me quickly! Thxs a lot!!! Jochen

[email protected], March 3, 2006 23:35

Use a different separator, such a single quote - :%s'http://www.somewhat.com/somwhere'http://www.nowhwere.com'

[email protected], June 16, 2006 8:27

This one threw me for a loop, and thought I'd contribute in case someone else is having the same problem. The web page I'm working on has a number of key-strokes, eg: <Alt>+<F> But I wanted it to look like this: <Alt> + <F> (with the spaces being non-breaking spaces.) So I wanted to search for >+< and replace with > + < The trick is that you don't escape the ampersands in the search part, but you have to for the replace part, otherwise it'll do some crazy concatinatin. %s/>+</\>\ +\ \</g

[email protected], June 16, 2006 8:28

This one threw me for a loop, and thought I'd contribute in case someone else is having the same problem. The web page I'm working on has a number of key-strokes, eg: <Alt>+<F> But I wanted it to look like this: <Alt> + <F> (with the spaces being non-breaking spaces.) So I wanted to search for >+< and replace with > + < The trick is that you don't escape the ampersands in the search part, but you have to for the replace part, otherwise it'll do some crazy concatinatin. <pre> %s/>+</\>\ +\ \</g </pre>

[email protected], June 16, 2006 8:32

Let's try this one more time: :%s/>+&am;lt;/\&am;gt;\ +\ \</g

[email protected], June 16, 2006 8:33

Let's try this one more time: :%s/>+</\>\ +\ \</g

[email protected], August 29, 2006 11:20

Okay... the big one for me was that I couldn't search and replace a string that contained a forward slash... couldn't escape it, put it in quotation marks, nothing! But changing the separator worked! ie: :%s'ezra/media/shoreline'shoreline'g NICE!

[email protected], December 12, 2006 7:50

Can anyone tell me how to replace text using :%s BUT to insert the contents of a register as the replacement text? i.e. the command would look like this :%s/text to replace/register contents/gI Many thanks in advance James Gilbert

[email protected], December 12, 2006 7:52

ps. In this case using <C-R><C-V> to pull the register contents onto the command line wouldn't work (I don't think?) as the register will contain over 10 lines of text...




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