CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexvim
quant
quant

Reputation: 23052

How do I match any sequence of letters and "something else" in vim?

I want to match any sequence of letters with some other special characters, say : and ;. Here's what I've tried to do:

/[\w;:]*

But this just seems to match everything. The VIM documentation gives [Vv] as an example for a regexp that can locate either V or v, and sure enough this seems to work. What am I doing wrong here?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 617

Answers (2)

Ingo Karkat
Ingo Karkat

Reputation: 172590

The \w atom doesn't work inside a collection. You need to either use branches:

/\%(\w\|[;:]\)*

but it's easier to look up the character ranges via :help /\w and put those into the collection:

/[0-9A-Za-z_;:]*

There are also several character classes; there's none for \w, but [:alnum:] comes close, missing only the _:

/[[:alnum:]_;:]*

Note: If you really just want letters, that would be \a or [:alpha:].

Upvotes: 1

Avinash Raj
Avinash Raj

Reputation: 174706

to match any sequence of letters with some other special characters, say : and ; 

[A-Za-z:;]*

\w not only includes letters but also digits and underscore symbol. * repeats the previous token zero or more times.

Upvotes: 1

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