| Tip 78 | Stake the Boundaries of a Match |
Sometimes we might want to specify a broad pattern and then focus on a subset of the match. Vim’s \zs and \ze items allow us to do just that.
Up until now, we’ve assumed a complete overlap between search patterns and the matches they generate. It’s time to pry these apart into two separate concepts. Let’s start by defining them. When we talk of a pattern, we refer to the regular expression (or literal text) that we type into the search field. When we talk of a match, we refer to any text in the document that appears highlighted (assuming the ‘hlsearch’ option is enabled).
The boundaries of a match normally correspond to the start and end of a pattern. But we can use the \zs and \ze items to crop the ...
Get Practical Vim, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
