vim how to search for URL

Question

How would you search for the following string in vim?

http://my.url.com/a/b/c

I've tried (a la Very No Magic)

:/\Vhttp://my.url.com/a/b/c

But it gives me:

E492 not an editor command: /\Vhttp://my.url.com/a/b/c

You would think there'd be a simple way to search a string literally... I'm not too interested in slash escaping every slash, or writing a complicated search, because I have to rapidly search different URLs in a text file.

Answer 1

I'm not sure why you get not an editor command since I don't. The simplest way to search without having to escape slashes is to use ? instead, e.g.

:?http://my.url.com/a/b/c
" or since the : is not necessary
?http://my.url.com/a/b/c

This does search in the other direction, so just keep that in mind

Answer 2

another way to search forward (from the position of your cursor) without escaping is use :s command.

you could do:

:%s@http://my.url.com/a/b/c@@n

then press n to navigate matched text forward, N backwards

If you want to know how many matches in the buffer, use gn instead of n

note that, I said "without escaping", I was talking about the slash, if you want to do search precisely, you have to escape the period. .. since in regex, . means any char.