How to replace a word using "vi editor"?

Question

I have here a sample text file called employees.txt. It contains the name, streets and cities of the employees.

My question is: How can I replace all city instances of "Victoria" with "City of Victoria". Only the city is affected, not places like Victoria Drive or people like Ashley Victoria?

I hope someone can help me.

For this you need to come up with a situations where all Victoria are distinguishable from all other "other word+Victoria+other word". Otherwise this will be impossible. Alternative: replace all and then replace all those that have an extra word? Is that an option? Basically what I am asking.... are those 2 the exception or is there more you want to skip? — Rinzwind, May 26 '22 at 18:58

Rinzwind · Answer 1 · 2022-05-26T19:55:48.090

You can tell vim to ask for confirmation:

:%s/Victoria/City\sof\sVictoria/gc

the %s replaces, the g does it globally, the c asks for confirumatiom
the \s is for a space.

That might be the quickest but does involve some manual work.

If those are the only 2 this would work too:

:%s/Victoria/City\sof\sVictoria/g
:%s/City\sof\sVictoria\sDrive/City\sof\sVictoria/g
:%s/Ashley\sCity\sof\sVictoria/Ashley\sVictoria/g

but if there are more of these this can become a long list. And do make a backup before you do this ;)

steeldriver · Answer 2 · 2022-05-26T20:41:42.887

You seem to be asking about regular expression lookaround assertions

At least in vim (vi improved) , you can use \@! for negative lookahead and \@<! for negative lookbehind. So for example to match Victoria that is not preceded by Ashley (Ashley-space):

\(Ashley \)\@<!Victoria

whereas to match Victoria that is not followed by Drive (space-Drive):

Victoria\( Drive\)\@!

Putting these together:

 :s/\(Ashley \)\@<!Victoria\( Drive\)\@!/City of &/g

where & on the RHS backsubstitutes the matching Victoria. Generalizing to any capitalized "words" before and after Victoria:

:s/\([[:upper:]][[:alpha:]-]* \)\@<!Victoria\( [[:upper:]][[:alpha:]-]*\)\@!/City of &/g

How to replace a word using "vi editor"?

3 Answers3