CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexvimmatchboundary
Reman
Reman

Reputation: 8109

Word boundary search and exclamation mark at end of word

I can't find out how to search words with an exclamation mark at the end using boundaries.

p.e. text:

Do this!

search:

/\<this!\>

This doesn't match this! in the text. This either:

/\<this\!\>

I suppose that VIM thinks it must be Lookahead/Lookbehind Zero-Length Assertion.
How can I resolve this?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1206

Answers (2)

Ingo Karkat
Ingo Karkat

Reputation: 172520

The ! is not a keyword character (in your case, at least), so a regular expression assertion for a keyword to non-keyword boundary (which \> is) won't match after it. What does work is this

/\<this\>!/

But here, the \> is superfluous, as s clearly is a keyword character, and ! isn't. So, only use the assertions where actually needed (like \< at the beginning in your example, to avoid matching foothis!), and all is well.

Alternatively, if for your purposes ! belongs to a word, and you want to match it as such, include it via

:setlocal iskeyword+=!

and use \k for matching inside the word, e.g. \<\k\{5}\> to find all 5-letter (key)words.

Upvotes: 4

speakr
speakr

Reputation: 4209

Try this (or replace \w with the character class your words consist of):

/\<\w\+\!

The ! is not part of a word so any word boundary match like \> will match before, not after.

Upvotes: 1

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