Regex to match beginning and end of line in Vim (quote around whole line)

Question

For an initial file with lines like this example:

1
12
123
1234
12345

The desired state of the file is

'1'
'12'
'123'
'1234'
'12345'

I've been doing this with two commands, :%s/^/'/g and :%s/$/'/g, that I would like to get into one. However, when I try

:%s/[$^]/'/g

I get the error

E486: Pattern not found: [$^]

I know the leading ^ in brackets means exclusion, so I figured putting $ first would mean match both the beginning and end of lines, which is obviously not happening.

How can I match both the beginning and end of lines in vim?

Solution 1

How about:

:%s/.*/'&'/

"Replace zero or more characters with those characters preceded and succeded by a single-quote".

Solution 2

^ and $ do not hold those meanings (start or end of line) inside [ ], which is used for selecting a group of characters. Inside [ ], most regex operators lose their meaning (and some characters gain special meaning, or get a different meaning). A leading ^ in [] means that the group is negated - match everything except these characters. So [^$] matches on any character other than $. (And [$^] matches just the $ and ^ characters.)

If you want to match the start or end of a line, use /^\|$/, where | is or (needs to be escaped in Vim's default regex mode).

So:

:%s/^\|$/'/g

The g is needed since the ^ and $ are two independent matches, and s by default only acts on the first match in a line.

Solution 3

You don't really need to match the beginning and end of the line if you can just greedily match the whole thing:

:%s/\(.*\)/'\1'/

The main thing to know is to escape the parenthesis to create the "capture group", then use \1 to refer back to what was captured.

Solution 4

With norm[al] command and A to append control, I to prepend control which we make the :exe[cute] command to execute the second prepend 'norm' since by default :norm[al]command cannot be followed by another command as in :help :normal documented.

so the command would be as below:

:exe "%norm A'" |%norm I'

Note that % here performing the changes on all lines.

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Comments

[user1717828]

Neat option. Not exactly a regex but it gets the job done in vim.

[user1717828]

Seems like a harder version of the accepted answer's %s/.*/'&'/g but maybe more extensible if there are several matching groups.