VIM: Finding and replacing first N occurrences of a word

Question

I am editing a file and i want to change only a specific word with another word, but only for first N occurrences. I tried multiple commands

N :s/word/newword/

:%s/word/newword/count

And other commands that i could find on google. But none of them works.

EDIT:: Vim commands is preferred. But Vim script can also be used. I don't have any prior experience in vim scripting.

Answer 1

Using a disposable recording allows you to control exactly how many changes you do:

qq             " start recording in register q
/foo<CR>       " search for next foo
cgnbar<Esc>    " change it to bar
q              " end recording
11@q           " play recording 11 times

See :help recording and :help gn.

Another way, using :normal:

:norm! /foo<C-v><CR>cgnbar<C-v><Esc>     <-- should look like this: :norm! /foo^Mcgnbar^[
11@:

See :help :normal and :help @:.

Or simply:

:/foo/|s//bar<CR>
11@:

Answer 2

Although a bit longer, you can do:

:call feedkeys("yyyq") | %s/word/newword/gc

to replace the first 3 occurrences and then stop. You can change the amount of y's for more or less replacements. (Can also use n to skip some)

Explanation: this is feeding y keystrokes into the /c confirm option of the substitution command.