replace - How to change a string in the vim editor?

Question

I am trying to replace a string with slashes in vim editor

ex: foo to abc/def/foo. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The title and the content of your question don't match.

:help pattern and :help :substitute are a bit overwhelming but very useful as regular expressions are at the heart of Vim.

Vim regular Expressions 101 is a more concise resource.

Anyway, given the following sample text:

bar baz foo baz bar

your goal can be achieved in a variety of ways. Here are some of them:

:s/foo//abc/def/foo
:s/foo//abc/def/&
:s+foo+/abc/def/&

A few notes:

• In the replacement part, & stands for "the matched text". If the match is foo, & is foo. Of course there's not much benefit in using & over foo, here, but wait until you have a more complex pattern…

• Because Slashes are used to separate the search part and the replace part, you need to escape the actual slashes in both parts for your substitution to work.

• You can use many other symbols instead of slashes to separate the search and the replace parts. This is very useful when you know you'll need to escape too many slashes.