Question

I want to do a simple mapping of the following command:

:'<,'>s/{\|}//gc

It will remove all curly brackets in the selected text, asking me before every change. It works perfectly.

If I write this into my .vimrc as a mapping like this:

vmap <leader>rc :<C-R>s/{\|}//gc<cr>

it suddenly tells me, it cannot match the pattern {|}, thus escaping the | seems not to be working.

Why and how do I create this mapping correctly?

Answer 1

Use the following:

:vmap <leader>rc :s/{\\|}//gc<CR>

It does operate on the selected text: for : in visual mode, you get '<,'> in front of the command.

A useful way to debug this kind of mappings is to leave out the final <CR>, so you see the command exactly as it would be executed. That’s how I noticed that <C-R> ate your s (because it expects register name as the next character) and that one layer of escaping is gone.