Question

I wanted to visually mark a few lines and then surround the whole range with <p> and </p>. After a lot of fiddling I have come up with this substitute command that seams to work:

:'<,'>s/^\(\_.*\)\%V/<p>\1<\/p>/

Is there a better way of doing this or could someone explain why it works?

\_. matches every characters including end-of-line. The ^ (start-of-line) and the \%V (match visual range) seams to behave strange. For example the documentation suggest that you use two \%V to surround your expression but that does not seams to be necessary. Using no \%V or having only one at the start matches the whole buffer. Removing the ^ causes the last line to be matched and substituted separately. A $ at the end seams to be unnecessary also.

Answer 1

1. Use surround vim

You can use surround.vim, in visual mode:

s<pEnter

E.g. vat (visual select ‘around’ tag), s<p surround with <p>...</p>

Breakdown:

• vat (visually select a tag; do any visual selection you wanted)
• s< (surround with tag), in this case, p

2. Use ex commands with the range markers

Edit: without surround you would be able to either

:C-u'<iEnter<p>Esc

:'>aEnter</p>Esc

3. Use yank and XML filetype plugin inserting register contents:

Or much simpler:

dO<p>¹C-r"Esc

Note that at ¹ my XML filtetype plugin (I think it is default) automatically provided the closing tag (</p>) so we can just insert the yanked contents using C-r" — without even leaving insert mode!