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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I know there's probably a way to do that using regex, but I can't quite seem to figure out regex in vim. I tried searching: /-\{2} but it catches triple hyphens, too.

I also can't just do a traditional find and replace, since I have triple hyphens in my file. Searching for -- returns triple hyphens in addition to double hyphens.

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Did you try :%s/--/---/g? It works for me. – Tomer Vromen Feb 18 '12 at 23:27
I should have said that my file also contains triple hyphens, so if I do that, I would get triple hyphens turning into quadruple hyphens. – Jon Feb 19 '12 at 18:54

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up vote 8 down vote accepted

How about :%s,-\@<!---\@!,---,g? That way it won't change '---' to '----'.

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That works, thanks! I don't understand how, but I'll go look up what commas and @ symbols mean in vim. – Jon Feb 19 '12 at 19:03
1  
@Jon The comma is a delimiter—whatever character immediately follows it is used to separate the search expression, the replace expression, and any options (in this case g). (Usually / is used, but it's not so nice to look at when you have lots of backslashes.) The -\@<! prevents the pattern from matching immediately after a '-', and the `-\@!' keeps it from matching immediately before a '-'. – Dr Kitty Feb 20 '12 at 0:29
up vote 2 down vote

Your example works for me, so I suspect you have a different character in your file that only looks like a hyphen.

I would suggest placing your cursor on one in normal mode, typing yl to yank the character, then typing / followed by pressing control-r then " (double quote). If that works, you can use the same trick to create your substitute command.

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I should have said above that my example, while it returns double hyphens, also returns triple hyphens, and so if I were to do a find/replace using that example, it would turn all my triple hyphens into quadruple hyphens, which is not what I want. But thanks very much for the yl, /, ctrl-r, " trick--I didn't know that one, and that's going to solve a lot of other problems for me. – Jon Feb 19 '12 at 19:01

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