CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vim
vineeshvs
vineeshvs

Reputation: 565

Search for a pattern in Vim excluding some possibilities

How can we search for a something in Vim, excluding some of the possibilities which the search would cover?

For example: Search for How\s[a-z] but the result should not include How a and should include How b, How c, ..., How z.

UPDATE One possible solution to the above illustrative example is How\s[b-z] as pointed out by @Jonathon K, which is correct. But what I am looking for is a generic solution in which I can exclude one of the many possible solutions in a Vim search (Example 2: Exclude ERROR when I search for er*. Ad-hoc solutions could be there for this case as well :) ).

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1244

Answers (1)

DJMcMayhem
DJMcMayhem

Reputation: 7669

Example 2: Exclude ERROR when I search for er*. Ad-hoc solutions could be there for this case as well.

Just FYI, er* will not match ERROR. It will match any of these:

e

er

errrrr

errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

You're probably thinking of ER.*

Moving on from that...

You're basically looking for the \@! quantifier. It asserts that the previous atom does not match at the current position. It's also zero-width. If you wanted to search for ER.* but not match ERROR, you could do this:

ER\(ROR\)\@!.*

Or as I prefer with "magic" on (\v):

\vER(ROR)@!.*

Or with your first example:

\vHow\sa@![a-z]

Even though I would recommend using [b-z] like Jonathon pointed out :)

Upvotes: 2

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