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According to this page you can use perl compatible regular expression with
:perldo s/pattern/insert/g.
This works fine.
But, how can I get interactive search and replace with PCRE syntax in vim?
Since this does not work with perldo I search for a different solution.
363
Vim has several regex modes, one of which is very magic that's very similar to traditional regex. Just put \v in the front and you won't have to escape as much.
Regular Expression (Regex or Regexp or RE) in Perl is a special text string for describing a search pattern within a given text. Regex in Perl is linked to the host language and is not the same as in PHP, Python, etc. Sometimes it is termed as “Perl 5 Compatible Regular Expressions“.
Python supports essentially the same regular expression syntax as Perl, as far as the regular expressions themselves. However, the syntax for using regular expressions is substantially different. Regular expression support is not available out of the box; you must import the re module.
Till the current release version of vim, there is no way to do :s/[perlRegex]/bar/c
So you are asking for a feature that doesn't exist.
You can do matching with verymagic, however it is not Perl Regex compatible flag. It is still using the vimregex engine, just changed the way of escaping regex patterns.
For example, in perl, you can do lookahead/behind (?<=foo)..., (?=foo), (?!foo).., you can use the handy \K : som.*ing\Kwhatever etc, you cannot use those syntax in vim directly, no matter which 'magic' level you have set. Vim has the same feature, but different syntax:
\@=
\@!
\@<=
and also the \zs \ze are very handy, even more powerful than perl's \K.
Vim is an Editor, with vim regex, you can not only do text matching, but also match base on visual selection, cursor position and so on.
If you really need to do complex pattern matching and really need do them in vim, learn vim regex! It is not difficult for you if you "know pcre very well"
137
Probably the closest you can get is:
:s/\vfoo/bar/gc
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