Question

I’m using vim to do some pattern matching on a text file. I’ve enabled search highlighting so that I know exactly what is getting matched on each search and am getting confused.

Consider searching for [a-z]* on the following text:

123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyxz987654321ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWQXZ

I expected this search to match zero or more consecutive characters that are in the range [a-z]. Instead, I get a match on the entire line.

Should this be the expected behaviour?

Thanks,

Andrew

Answer 1

It’s matching the empty strings that occur after every character. It has no way of highlighting empty ranges, so it looks like everything is highlighted.

Try searching for [a-z]\+ instead.