Substituting characters for a matched regular expression in vi

The vi editor is a screen-oriented text editor that supports regular expressions for pattern matching and character substitution. Vim which stands for "Vi IMproved" is a clone of vi and recognizes similar commands.

If you want to replace or insert characters at the beginning of a line, the line beginning is represented by the caret character, i.e., ^ (Shift-6 on a standard computer keyboard), and line endings are represented by the dollar sign character, i.e., $.

E.g., the following quote has three occurences of the word "us". If I wanted to replace only the "us" at the end of the line with "ourselves", I could hit the colon key while not in vi's insert mode, which would give me a colon prompt and then enter s /us$/ourselves/ which would replace the occurence of "us" at the end of the lne with "ourselves".

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The s tells vi that I want to perform a substituion while the forward slashes separate the string I want to replace, us$, which is the word "us" at the end of the line with the new string, "ourselves".

If I wanted to replace all occurences of the word "us" in the line with ourselves, I could use s /us/ourselves/g. I.e., I would omit the $ and add a g at the end to indicate I want to replace the word globally on the line, i.e., all instances of it.

If you wish to replace a forward slash in a line, you can use a backslash as an escape character , i.e., its presence before a character "escapes" the meaning that would otherwise be attached to that character. E.g., if I wanted to replace both of the forward slashes in "1/4 and 1/2" with dashes, I could use s /\//-/g . You don't necessarily have to use forward slashes to separate the string you want to locate and the replacement string. E.g., for the same replacement I could use colons, i.e., s:\/:-:g or s :us$:ourselves: in the example of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote. And, if I'm not using the forward slash to separate the to be replaced pattern and the replacement pattern I don't have to escape the meaning of the forward slash, i.e,, I could use s :/:-:g to replace the forward slashes with a dash.

If I want to perform a substitution only at the beginning of a line, I can use the caret, ^ character. E.g., suppose I have the following lines:

this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
this other Eden, demi-paradise,
this fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
this happy breed of men, this little world,
this precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as [a] moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England...

If I want to change all occurences of "this" where the word occurs at the beginning of a line to have a capital "T", but only when the word occurs at the beginning of a line, if I position the cursor at the first line and if the last line above is the last line in the file, I can use the following:

.,$ s/^this/This/g

The period specifies I want to start making changes from the current line and the dollar sign specifies I want to go all the way through to the last line. You can also specify specific line numbers, e.g., if the first line was line 58 and the last line was line 67, I could use the following, instead.

58,67 s/^this/This/g

Sometimes you might want to perform a substitution only if the line begins with a character in a certain range of characters. E.g., suppose I have the following lines in a text file that I want to convert to an HTML file for a web page:

Part Number:
- CM-9E8A-B
Case Color:
- Black (Red)
Case Material:
- 0.5mm SECC Steel
Tower Size:
- Micro ATX/ ITX Tower
Motherboard Support:
- Micro ATX/ ITX

I want to insert "<tr><td>" before any line that begins with alphabetic character that is a capital letter from A to Z. I don't want to insert the "<tr><td>" before any of the lines that begin with a dash. I could use the following to make that subsitution assuming the relevant line numbers are lines 176 through 186.

176,186 s /^[A-Z]/<tr><td>&/g

By putting "A-Z" within the brackets, I'm specifying that I want to search for any occurences of the letters A through Z, though just the capital letters. Putting the "^" before the left-most bracket means that I only want to perform the substitution when the letter occurs at the beginning of the line. The ampersand, &, represents whatever pattern I searched for, so for the substitution "<tr><td>" will be inserted followed by whatever it was I searched for, i.e., the search pattern of a capital A through Z at the beginning of a line. So I would get the following, instead, as a result of the substitution:

<tr><td>Part Number:
- CM-9E8A-B
<tr><td>Case Color:
- Black (Red)
<tr><td>Case Material:
- 0.5mm SECC Steel
<tr><td>Tower Size:
- Micro ATX/ ITX Tower
<tr><td>Motherboard Support:
- Micro ATX/ ITX

 

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