Vim regular expression to match string with prefix and suffix

Question

I want to search a string which starts with "abc" and ends with "xyz" in vim.

Below are the commands I've tried:

:1,$g/abc[\w\W]*xyz/ :1,$g/abc\[\\w\\W\]\*xyz/ :1,$g/abc*xyz/ 

"[\w\W]*" means the texts between "abc" and "xyz" can be any characters

"1,$" means the search range is from the 1st line to the last line in the file opened by vim.

I found that the search pattern

abc[\w\W]*xyz  

works in https://regex101.com/

why does it fail in vim?

Answer 1

The command below should work unless "any character" means something different for you than for Vim:

:g/abc.*xyz 

• . means "any character except an EOL".
• * means "any number (including 0) of the previous atom".
• 1,$ could be shortened to %.
• :global works on the whole buffer by default so you don't even need the %.
• The closing / is not needed if you don't follow :g/pattern by a command as in :g/foo/d.

Answer 2

Once the file gets too large (say, 1GB), ":g/abc.*xyz" becomes quite slow.

I found that

cat fileName | grep abc | grep xyz >> searchResult.txt 

is more efficient than using the search function in vim.

I know that this method may return lines that start with "xyz" and end with "abc".

But since this is a rare case in my file(and maybe this doesn't happen quite often for other people), I think I should write this method here.