Find and replace strings in vim on multiple lines

vivim

I can do :%s/<search_string>/<replace_string>/g for replacing a string across a file, or :s/<search_string>/<replace_string>/ to replace in current line.

How can I select and replace words from selective lines in vim?

Example: replace text from lines 6-10, 14-18 but not from 11-13.

Best Answer

Replace All:

:%s/foo/bar/g

Find each occurrence of 'foo' (in all lines), and replace it with 'bar'.

For specific lines:

:6,10s/foo/bar/g

Change each 'foo' to 'bar' for all lines from line 6 to line 10 inclusive.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to effectively work with multiple files in Vim

How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Related Topic

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.