Question

I’m looking for a way to replace all dots in a line except the last one.

Example:

Blah - whatever - foo.bar.baz.avi should become
Blah - whatever - foo bar bar.avi

Since I’ll have more than one line in the file and the amount of dots varies in each line I’m looking for a generic solution and not something like “Replace the first X matches” with X being a constant.

Answer 1

This seems to do the trick:

%s/\.\(.*\.\)\@=/ /g

\@= is a lookahead. It only matches a full stop if there are any following full stops.

See :help zero-width.