This page contains some really cool regular expressions for Vim.
I'll extend them to future reference.
Search multiple lines
By default, a regex checks line by line. Some suggest to include line wraps \n\r
explicitly (but I've not confirmed if that works).
Vim supports the construct \_. to match any character including line breaks.
The following Regex:
/@incollection\_.\{-}\(\(booktitle\)\|\(crossref\)\)
searches a BIB file for all @incollection entries and highlights
up to the following booktitle or crossref.
The `{-} ensures a non-greedy behavior, i.o.w. it only goes unto
the shortest possible match (see below).
Source
Find the shortest possible match
Commonly, a regex will match as much characters as possible.
Not only in multi-line matches (as shown above), but sometimes
also in other situations,
a non-greedy behavior is wanted.
A simple approach to match the next character is to exclude that
from the pattern between:
But if the regex gets more complex, the special multi token \{-} can
be used. It will match the shortest possible pattern.
See :help non-greedy and [Source](multi token \{-} can
be used. It will match the shortest possible pattern.
See :help non-greedy and Source
Search for lines NOT containing certain words
/@\(\(article\)\@!\&\(inproceedings\)\@!\&.*\){
I've a BibLatex file and want to check all entries, that are not
of the classes @article and @inproceedings (all entry types
are spelled in lower case, so that I don't have to deal with that).
If the file contains:
01 @article{a,
02 title={Demo article},
03 }
04 @report{b,
05 title={Demo report},
06 }
07 @inproceedings{c,
08 title={Demo presentation},
09 }
10 @misc{d,
11 title={Demo web reference},
12 }
This search pattern would find the lines containing an @ and not article
or inproceedings, but something and than an opening curly brace {.
This matches the lines 4 and 10.