Vim \zs and \ze

[OnlineCop]

I apologize in advance; I am a very infrequent vim user, so some of this may need to be double-checked.

• \zs sets the start of a match.
• \ze sets the end of a match.

Vim's \zs appears to work like PCRE's \K (which discards matched text up to that point):

• PCRE pattern: s/foo\Kfoo/bar/g
• Vim pattern: :%s/foo\zsfoo/bar/g

Text: foofoofoofoo
Result: foobarfoobar

On the other hand, vim's \ze appears to work more like a lookahead:

• PCRE pattern: s/foo(?=foo)/bar/g
• Vim pattern: :%s/foo\zefoo/bar/g
• Vim's lookahead pattern: :%s/foo\(foo\)\@=/bar/g

Text: foofoofoofoo
Result: barbarbarfoo

I thought it might be useful to include the \K similarities in your Vim cheatsheet.

[remram44]

This might be worth adding, though I don't know which other dialects have that feature. They also overlap somewhat with the look-around operators.