Vim escape backslash paste

Question

I am having the following text in vim:

Hello, \/Good\/Bye.

Now I want to change it to:

Hello, -Good-Bye.

So I use: Visual Select, Yank the Line. then

%s/<Ctrl+R>+"/-/gc

When I push CTRL+R+" The line clones into the search, but It \\/ will not work. I need to change it to \\\\/ . Is there a quick function or keystroke to automatically escape the chars? Please let me know. Thank you!

Answer 1

As phd wrote in comments, you can use \\V and escape() to do it. For example, write the following function:

function! Regesc(text)
    return '\V' . escape(a:text, '/\')
endf

Then after yanking some text, use it like this:

:%s/ Ctrl+R =Regesc(@@) CR /-/gc CR

This will display and run the following command, depending of what you yanked:

:%s/\\VHello, \\\\\\/Good\\\\\\/Bye./-/gc

Answer 2

You could use another delimiter after your visual selection

:'<,'>s,\%V\\/\%V,-,gc

\\ ......... scaped backslash
\%V ........ visual selection area

So you have to put your pattern \\\\/ inside a visual delimiter