I have something akin to
and need to change the single quotation marks to double quotation marks. I tried :s/\\\'.*\\\'/\
There's also surround.vim, if you're looking to do this fairly often. You'd use cs'"
to change surrounding quotes.
You need to use groupings:
:s/\'\(.*\)\'/\"\1\"
This way argument 1 (ie, \1) will correspond to whatever is delimited by \( and \).
You've got the right idea -- you want to have "\1"
as your replace clause, but you need to put the "Hello There" part in capture group 1 first (0 is the entire match). Try:
:%/'\(.*\)'/"\1"
You need to put round brackets around the part of the expression you wish to capture.
s/\'\(.*\)\'/"\1"/
But, you might have problems with unintentional matching. Might you be able to simply replace any single quotes with double quotes in your file?
Just an FYI - to replace all double quotes with single, this is the correct regexp - based on rayd09's example above
:%s/"\([^"]*\)"/'\1'/g
%s/'\([^']*\)'/"\1"/g
You will want to use [^']*
instead of .*
otherwise
'apples' are 'red'
would get converted to "apples' are 'red"