Can I substitute multiple items in a single regular expression in VIM or Perl?

Question

Let\'s say I have string \"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog\" can I change this to \"The slow brown fox jumps over the energetic dog\" with one regular expression

Answer 1

Chas's answer is good, the only other thing I'd mention is that if you're doing word swaps you probably want to be matching on

\b(foo|bar|baz|qux)\b

to avoid matching substrings. If you doing a lot of word swapping, you might start to find regexps a bit limiting and want to do something like:

join '', map { exists $subst{$_} ? $subst{$_} : $_ } split /\b/, $string