vim使用以前匹配的模式搜索并替换表达式

Question

I have multiple lines in my data file like below

<some-text>:<fixed-string>

and I want to add space around the colon to feed to some other tool that expects this. I would like to do this in vim (not sed or other tools).

I was trying to do something like

%s/[a-z]*:<fixed-string>/\1 : <fixed-string>/gc

this doesn't seem to work. Can someone please help ? To take care of upper & lower case I tried using (\\a)* thats next step.

Answer 1

You do not have any capture groups so you can not use \\1 . You either need to use capture groups, \\zs & \\ze , or look-behinds and look-aheads.

With a capture group:

:%s/\(\l*\):fixed/\1 : fixed/gc

With \\zs and \\ze to set the start and end of the match

:%s/\l*\zs:\zefixed/ : /gc

Look-aheads, \\@= , and Look-behinds, \\@= :

:%s/\(\l*\)\@<=:\(fixed\)\@=/ : /gc

Personally, I use use \\zs and \\ze as they are the simplest to reason about and use. I am also using \\l which is short hand for [az] .

For more help see:

:h /\(
:h /\zs
:h /\@<=
:h /\@=
:h /\l

Answer 2

please try this:

%s/\\(.*\\):fixed-string$/\\1 : fixed-string/g

or this:

%s/:fixed-string$/ : fixed-string/g