Question

I have a rather hairy vim regular expression that will capitalise words separated with underscores as below

my_text_example -> My_Text_Example

The regular expression is

s/\(\<\|_\)\([a-zA-Z]\)\([a-zA-Z]*\)/\u\1\u\2\L\3/g

I would like to map that to a key sequence (for example gc). I would also like it to work in visual selection mode.

I tried this

nmap gc :s/\(\<\|_\)\([a-zA-Z]\)\([a-zA-Z]*\)/\u\1\u\2\L\3/g<CR>

in my .vimrc, but I get an error that the regular expression is not found. I haven’t tried the imap version, hopefully that will be simple once I get an answer for the nmap case.

Answer 1

This works:

nmap gc :s/\(\<\\|_\)\([a-zA-Z]\)\([a-zA-Z]*\)/\u\1\u\2\L\3/g<CR>

I think it didn’t work because \< is a zero-width pattern but that is just a wild guess.

If someone can explain why it didn’t work that’d be great!