vim search wildcard match first occurrence

Question

I have a file that <a href="blah.com" rel="blahblah" style="textdecoration:none;">blah</a>

I want to match rel="blahblah"

but when i do \rel=".*" it matches rel="blahblah" style="textdecoration:none;"

I have tried rel=".*\{-\}" but that gives an error nested \{

Solution 1

You can use:

rel=".\{-}"

\{-} is used for non-greedy match in VIM

Solution 2

Try [^"] instead of .. The latter is "greedy" and will match as many characters as possible.

The [d-r13579] in regexps is used to match "character classes": in this case any small case letter in the range from d to r or an odd digit. If you start the class with a ^ then it negates the meaning.

Thus [^"] means a character except a double quote, and "[^"]*" means two double quotes with any number of arbitrary characters between them, except double quotes.

Solution 3

By default regex matchers are greedy.

  s/rel=".\{-}"/aaaaaaa/

works for me

{-} means short circuit the expression to match the shortest pattern.

Comments

[mazlix]

could you expand on that? I tried /rel="[^"] and that just returned rel="b

[mazlix]

it says pattern not found and if i escape the ? :/rel=".*\?" it says Nested \?

[Peter Tillemans]

my apologies, I used the perl syntax first before I realised vi uses another syntax. I learned again something new, thanks

[bandi]

@mazlix I meant /rel="[^"]*". You need the asterisk to match everything in the quotes.

[mazlix]

oh.. so what's the [^"] do exactly?.. i thought the " in there was to represent the fact that i'm looking for a closing "

[bandi]

@mazlix I added the explanation to the answer.

[jtony]

This is super useful when I don't want to match the longest string but the first one. Thansk a bunch!