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vimvigreedyregex-greedyboost-regex

How to replace first occurrence only in vim

Is there any option to replace the first occurrence without asking for confirmation in vim?

I want to replace New York with \place{New York} in the first occurrence only without asking for confirmation. I used this code:

silent! /\\begin{text}/,/\\end{textit}/s/New York/\\place{New York}/g

> \begin{text}..[paragraphs]...\end{textit}

New York may be contained 10 times in the paragraph.

Solution

  • So you want to in a line range do only single substitution, not one sub per line. So the /start/,/end/ s/pat/rep/ will not work. I would make your example simpler, given that we have:

    foo
nyc nyc
nyc nyc
bar

    I guess what you are expecting to have is

    foo
\\place{nyc} nyc
nyc nyc
bar

    However :/foo/,/bar/ s/nyc/\\place{&} will give 

    foo
\\place{nyc} nyc
\\place{nyc} nyc
bar

    Because :s will do sub for each line in range.

    I would narrow the range to solve this problem:

    /foo//nyc/s/nyc/\\place{&}/

    note that between /foo/ and /nyc/, there is no comma.

    The output should be:

    foo
\\place{nyc} nyc
nyc nyc
bar

    You may want to read :h range for details.