I want to search a string which starts with "abc" and ends with "xyz" in vim.
Below are the commands I've tried:
:1,$g/abc[\w\W]*xyz/
:1,$g/abc\[\\w\\W\]\*xyz/
:1,$g/abc*xyz/
"[\w\W]*" means the texts between "abc" and "xyz" can be any characters
"1,$" means the search range is from the 1st line to the last line in the file opened by vim.
I found that the search pattern
abc[\w\W]*xyz
works in
why does it fail in vim?
4 Answers
The command below should work unless "any character" means something different for you than for Vim:
:g/abc.*xyz
.means "any character except an EOL".*means "any number (including 0) of the previous atom".1,$could be shortened to%.:globalworks on the whole buffer by default so you don't even need the%.- The closing
/is not needed if you don't follow:g/patternby a command as in:g/foo/d.
Once the file gets too large (say, 1GB), ":g/abc.*xyz" becomes quite slow.
I found that
cat fileName | grep abc | grep xyz >> searchResult.txt
is more efficient than using the search function in vim.
I know that this method may return lines that start with "xyz" and end with "abc".
But since this is a rare case in my file(and maybe this doesn't happen quite often for other people), I think I should write this method here.
It seems that inside the collection syntax [..], character classes such as \w can't be used, probably because it tests via character-by-character strategy. From :h /[]:
Matching with a collection can be slow, because each character in the text has to be compared with each character in the collection. Use one of the other atoms above when possible. Example: "\d" is much faster than "[0-9]" and matches the same characters.
You can, however, use similar functionalities specifically prepared for [..] syntax. From :h /[] again :
A character class expression is evaluated to the set of characters belonging to that character class.
examples include:
[:alnum:] letters and digits
[:alpha:] letters
[:blank:] space and tab characters
[:cntrl:] control characters
[:digit:] decimal digits
[:graph:] printable characters excluding space
[:lower:] lowercase letters
If you want to find them one by one you can hit
/
and then write
abc.*xyz
and hit enter to find the first occurrence of the pattern. Then use n for the next occurrence and Shift + n for the previous one. This is how I usually do, since for me this is easier to modify those lines.
