Question

Given the following line:

[aaaa bbbb cccc dddd] [decimal](18, 0) NULL,

How would you replace the spaces only between the first set of brackets in Vim? What would the /s command look like?

Update:

This is the intend outcome

    [aaaa_bbbb_cccc_dddd] [decimal](18, 0) NULL,

Answer 1

The easiest way to do it would be to visually select the contents of the []ed string and perform the replacement just on that selection:

vi]:s/\%V \%V/_/g

This doesn’t work very well if you’re trying to do things programmatically, though. In that case, you can match the entire []ed string and use a replacement expression to construct the result.

:s/\[[^\]]*\]/\=substitute(submatch(0), ' ', '_', 'g')/g