I have to replace every occurrence of % in a file with
% |. I have been effectively replacing text using the
following construct:
:%s/\<text\>/replacement/g
However when I try to do the following:
:%s/\<%\>/% |/g
I am greeted by an error message. Obviously, the %
character needs to be treated differently for being
replaced. Escap sequence?
The error message returned should give a clue regarding the
problem ("E486: Pattern not found: \<%\>"). Your pattern
"\<text\>" works well for words, ensuring that you don't find
them as a sub-portion of some other word (such as finding the
"foo" in "food", "snafoo", or "confoosion"). However, the "\<"
and "\>" tokens require a transition from a non-word-character to
a word-character (or vice-versa). The "%" character, by default,
is not a key-word character (though this can be altered by
changing the 'iskeyword' setting).
Unless there is some context in which you *don't* want to replace
a "%" with "% |", you can just use
:%s/%/% |/g
without the "\<" and "\>" markers. You can read more about the
problematic operators at
:help /\<
or making them part of the set of characters that constitute a
keyword, by reading at
:help 'iskeyword'
HTH,
-tim
