How to do whole-word search similar to "grep -w" in Vim

Question

How do I do a whole-word search like grep -w in Vim, which returns only lines where the sought-for string is a whole word and not part of a larger word?

grep -w : Select only those lines containing matches that form whole words.

Can this be done in Vim?

Answer 1

\<bar\>

matches bar but neither foobar nor barbaz nor foobarbaz.

Use it like this in a substitution:

:s/\<bar\>/baz

Use it like this to list all the lines containing the whole word bar:

:g/\<bar\>

:h pattern is a good read.