Delete anything other than pattern

Question

Let\'s say this is my text:

this is my text this
is my text this is my text
my text is this

I would like to highlight all text ex

Answer 1

I've implemented Benoit's clever regular expression as a custom :DeleteExcept command in my PatternsOnText plugin. It offers other related commands like :SubstituteExcept or :SubstituteInSearch, too.

OP's example would be

:%DeleteExcept /text/

Comparing that with @Benoit's explicit command (:%s/\(^\|\(text\)\@<=\).\{-}\($\|text\)\@=//g), it's a lot simpler.

Answer 2

Forgive me, because I'm not a vim expert, but wouldn't prepending the search with v find the inverse so that you could do something like this?

:v/pattern/d

Answer 3

Try this:

:%s/\(^\|\(text\)\@<=\).\{-}\($\|text\)\@=//g

Explanation:

\(^\|\(text\)\@<=\)     # means start of line, or some point preceded by “text”
.\{-}                   # as few characters as possible
\($\|text\)\@=          # without globbing characters, checking that we reached either end of line or occurrence of “text”.

Another way to do it:

• Create a function that count matches of a pattern in a string (see :help match() to help you design that)
• Use: :%s/.*/\=repeat('text', matchcount('text', submatch(0)))