Question

I just stumbled on a case where I had to remove quotes surrounding a specific regex pattern in a file, and the immediate conclusion I came to was to use vim’s search and replace util and just escape each special character in the original and replacement patterns.

This worked (after a little tinkering), but it left me wondering if there is a better way to do these sorts of things.

The original regex (quoted): '/^\//' to be replaced with /^\//

And the search/replace pattern I used:

s/'\/\^\\\/\/'/\/\^\\\/\//g


Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use almost any character as the regex delimiter. This will save you from having to escape forward slashes. You can also use groups to extract the regex and avoid re-typing it. For example, try this:

:s#'\(\\^\\//\)'#\1#

I do not know if this will work for your case, because the example you listed and the regex you gave do not match up. (The regex you listed will match '/^\//', not '\^\//'. Mine will match the latter. Adjust as necessary.)