VIM: Regular expressions

The lookaround assertions in vim are as follows:

The special forms \@42<= and ATOM\@42<! limit the range that is searched to 42 bytes.

TODO: \& works the same as using \@=: foo\&.. is the same as \(foo\)\@=... But using \& is easier, you don't need the braces.

A pattern can be interpreted in one of four ways.

The option magic, nomagic determines if it is interpreted magic nor non-magic. Within the pattern, this can also be forced using \m (magic) and \M (non-magic).

In addition, \v forces very magic, \V forces very non-magic.

With very magic, all ASCII characters except alpha-numeric ones (0…9, a…z, A…Z and _) have a special meaning.

With very non-magic, in order for a character to become a special meaning, it must be preceded by a backslash. In addition, the pattern terminating characters (/ (or ?)) have obviously a special meaning.

As per this Stackoverflow answer, there is way to permanently or globally enforcing very magic. As alternative, it is suggest to use the mapping :cnoremap s/ s/\v.

A unicode character can be indicated with \%u:

Search for hebrew letter א (unicode character U+05D0):

/\%u05d0

Searching for a unicode range. The following regular expression searches for hebrew characters between ב (U+05D1) and ד (U+05D3):

/[\u05d1-\u05d3]

:help perl-patterns lists a few differences between Perl's flavor of regular expressions and Vim's flavor.

VIM script: regular expressions

regular expressions

The logiPat plugin offers boolean-logic based on regular expression pattern matching.