Vim: lazy match on wildcard
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May 8, 08
Got a question about vim pattern matching that I had to look up, probably worth sharing.
Say you have the following text, and you want to modify the quoted things, so you start with this:
blah blah blah "BLAH" blah blah "FOO" blah blah
And want to end up with this:
blah blah blah <"BLAH"> blah blah <"FOO"> blah blah
Run this:
:%s/\(".\{-\}"\)/<\1>/g
I expected ".*?" to work (valid Perl regex syntax?), but ultimately found ".{-}" worked with Vim (and don't forget to escape the "{" and "}" characters, so \{ and \}).