Question

I have a line like below.

fullname = (this is a test name);

I want to double quote all the strings inside “(” and “)”.

i.e fullname = (“this” “is” “a” “test” “name”);

Can someone give me a vim regex to do that?

Answer 1

This does it:

:%s/\v(\(.*)@<=[[:alnum:]]+(.*\))@=/"&"/g

Be aware that matching nested patterns (such in parentheses) with regex will go wrong if the input is malformed. The above does not handle nested parentheses at all, and quoted or escaped parentheses will also break it. Handle with care.

It reads as follows:

:%s               substitute on all lines
/                 matching
\v                (with "very magic" switched on)
(\(.*)@<=         a position that follows an opening paren, on this line
[[:alnum:]]+      a series of alphanumeric characters (i.e. "words")
(.*\))@=          that are followed by a closing paren, on this line
/                 replace with
"&"               the match, in quotes
/g                globally

It is a notable fact that vim does actually support variable length look-behind. Most modern regex implementations do not.