Vim’s regular
expression
dialect is distinct from many of the other more popular ones out there
today (and actually predates them). One of the dialect differences that
always leaves me fumbling has to do with which special characters need
to be escaped. Vim does have a special “very magic” mode (that is
activated by “\v” in the regular expression) that makes thing very
clean and simple in this regard: only letters, numbers and underscores
are treated as literals without escaping. But I have never got used to
the habit of preceding my expressions with “\v”, though maybe I
should. In the mean time however, I thought I would put up a quick
reference that lists all the special regular expression characters in
the default “magic” mode Vim dialect, divided into those that do not
need to be escaped vs. those that do.
Regular Expression Special Characters Not Requiring Escaping
The following special characters are interpreted as regular expression operators without escaping (escaping will result in them being intepreted as literals):
\ |
Escape next character (use "\\" for literal backslash). |
^ |
Start-of-line (at start of pattern). |
$ |
End-of-line. |
. |
Matches any character. |
* |
Matches 0 or more occurrences of the previous atom. |
~ |
Matches last given substitute string. |
[...] |
Matches any of the characters given within the brackets. |
[^...] |
Matches any character not given within the brackets. |
& |
In replacement pattern: insert the whole matched search pattern. |
Regular Expression Special Characters Requiring Escaping
The following special characters are interpreted as regular expression operators only when escaped (otherwise they will be interpreted as literals):
\< |
Matches beginning of a word (left word break/boundary). | ||||||||||
\> |
Matches end of a word (right word break/boundary). | ||||||||||
\(...\) |
Grouping into an atom. | ||||||||||
\| |
Separating alternatives. | ||||||||||
\_. |
Matches any single character or end-of-line. | ||||||||||
\+ |
1 or more of the previous atom (greedy). | ||||||||||
\= |
0 or one of the previous atom (greedy). | ||||||||||
\? |
0 or one of the previous atom (greedy). | ||||||||||
\{ |
Multi-item count match specification (greedy).
|
||||||||||
\{- |
Multi-item count match specification (non-greedy).
|