[ale] VI vs perl RE question

[jknapka at kneuro.net (Joe Knapka)]

Jim wrote:

>I'm trying to use vi to search for something enclosed in quotes, using 
>perl RE I get a hit with $var =~/"(.*?)"/;  But using the same re in vi 
>  
>
So this is, "a quote, possibly followed by something, followed by 
another quote".
(The question mark is redundant, since * already means "0 or more 
occurrences".)

/".*"

 should work. But you probably really mean

/"[^"]*"

That is, a quote, possibly followed by non-quote stuff, followed by 
another quote.
If you want to do the grouping you need to escape the parens (but not the
brackets, which is weird IMO):

/"\([^"]*\)"

If you're doing it in a :s/// command, remember to specify which lines 
you want
to search; eg

:%s/"\([^"]*\)"/\1/gc

to replace "X" with X throughout the document.

-- JK