Capturing group in search/replace

[erigul]

Please thumbs-up 👍 this issue if it personally affects you! You can do this by clicking on the emoji-face on the top right of this post. Issues with more thumbs-up will be prioritized.

---

What did you do?

In a document containing the string
some test text
run the command
:%s/te\(.\)t/\1/g

Put the exact keys you pressed.
: to open the vim command prompt, type in%s/te\(.\)t/\1/g and hit the Enter key.

What did you expect to happen?

some test text to be replaced with some s x

What happened instead?

Nothing

Technical details:

• VSCode Version: 1.6.1
• VsCodeVim Version: 0.4.0
• OS: Windows 7

[johnfn]

My guess is this is some consequence of the regex engine we're using, which is Javascript's, not Vim's.

[rebornix]

@johnfn that explains difficult-hard :)

[DrakeXiang]

vscode's built in search support group capturing, can we use that?

[johnfn]

Unfortunately, I doubt it, because it's highly unlikely that VSCode's capturing works in the same way as Vim's.

[lucastheisen]

You can use vscode's built-in search support for group capturing... You just need to use JS syntax instead. From the example in the original question, just use:

:%s/te(.)t/$1/g

:%s/te\(.\)t/\1/g

While I am a huge vi fan, I really dislike their regex syntax. To me, the JS syntax feels cleaner (not so many \ escapes) and more advanced (more character groups, and other features, though I could be mistaken here).

The only negatives I have encountered are:

1. If you are expecting vi regex syntax, you might get a little frustrated (took me a while to realize this)
2. I cannot figure out how to add a newline in the substitution string (\r in a vi substitute)
   According to vscode release notes, this was added to their built-in find/replace

[Chillee]

This is added with the new "enableNeovim" option (on master).

[mathemaphysics]

I might also add here that the whole match character, '&' in vim, is actually '$&' in JS. I found this out through trial and error.