Vim find and replace all occurrences of a regex string

Question

I have a file with a few thousand lines, and in this file I have some regex expressions...

The regex expressions are all over the place, and recently we've changed the expression and I need to update all of them.

I need to change all instances of: [A-z -']+ with [A-z \-']+

so I tried doing :%s/[A-z -']+/[A-z \-']+/g but that replaced all occurrences of [A-z -']+ with [A-z -'[A-z -']+

Is there some other way to do this?

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-25 18:04:34Z

3

You may use this substitution:

%s/\[A-z -']/[a-zA-Z '-]/g

It is wrong to use [A-z] as it will match many more characters than just [A-Za-z] and it is better to move hyphen to end position before closing ] to get the regex right.

answered Sep 25, 2019 at 18:04

anubhava

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2 Comments

Quinn Over a year ago

Thanks, that worked - Could you explain why '- will match hyphens but -' doesn't?

anubhava Over a year ago

hyphen, if used in the middle of a character class is used as a range rather than literally. So your regex will match characters from space (0x20) to ' (0x27)

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