Question

When you try to remove html tags from a line, one possible way of doing it, is to use the :s command and write a regex that understands the beginning and the end of a tag at the same time. My go for it was:

:s %</?center>%%g

But this way, vim says it doesn’t find anything. So I had to use the following instead, which worked:

:s %</*center>%%g

Why is that one works but the other doesn’t? Shouldn’t ? say “the character before can come once or maybe not at all”?

Answer 1

You need to escape ? with \.

Refer help-page:

:h pattern-overview