CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimneovim
codehia
codehia

Reputation: 184

How to search for all occurrences of the string `**` in a file using vim?

How to search for ** in a file using vim like **kwargs , when I use a /** it highlights the entire file.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1004

Answers (2)

romainl
romainl

Reputation: 196546

* is a meta-character that needs to be escaped to become a regular character:

/\*\*

Vim refers to this as "magic": if the pattern is "magic", you need to escape meta-characters, if it is "nomagic", you don't (this is a bit over-simplified, see :help magic).

Therefore, you can force Vim to treat the pattern as "nomagic" with \M or even "very nomagic", with \V:

/\V**

Which doesn't help much, here, but well…

As for why /** highlights the whole buffer, a hint can be found under :help /star:

Exception: When "*" is used at the start of the pattern or just after
"^" it matches the star character.
  • The first * matches (at least some of) the stars in your buffer,
  • The second * matches zero or more of the preceding atom, as many as possible, so, essentially, every character.

Upvotes: 3

UndercoverDog
UndercoverDog

Reputation: 179

You have to escape the * symbol, try

/\*\*

On the text below I added extra spaces to be easier to read

#Don't use this one
/ \* \*

Upvotes: 1

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