Vim - capture in between slashes?

Question

Is there a motion for capturing text in between / or \? I know there is motions for other symbols ---

ci" - Capture 'text' inside "text"

vi( - Visual capture int var inside foo(int var)

di[ - Delete word [word] into []

The only workaround I can find is by using Vim Surround, and using it to change surrounding \ into " (cs\"), and then working from there. However, not only is it that kind of tedious, but the plugin only supports backslashes, not forward.

Answer 1

You could write your own text-object for this pretty easily.

onoremap <silent> i/ :<C-U>normal! T/vt/<CR> " inside /
onoremap <silent> a/ :<C-U>normal! F/vf/<CR> " around /

For it to work with visual mode :

xnoremap <silent> i/ :<C-U>normal! T/vt/<CR> " inside /
xnoremap <silent> a/ :<C-U>normal! F/vf/<CR> " around /

Similarly you could also do for \

Edit: Added info comments.

Answer 2

Here's one way to do it with a mapping:

  nnoremap H mal??e+1<Enter>mb//<Enter>y`b`a

This mapping will yank everything between two occurrences of the last search pattern.

Place it in your .vimrc file to make it permanent.

Usage for your question:

• search for forward slash: /\/ (note the backslash escape character)
• position cursor between two slashes (or on second slash)
• press H

Everything between the last / and the next / will get yanked.

Explanation:

  nnoremap H mal??e+1<Enter>mb//<Enter>y`b`a

 - nnoremap H      map H in normal mode, ignoring other mappings    
 - ma              place a mark (named a) at the current cursor location
 - l               move the cursor one char to the right
 - ??e+1<Enter>    move to 1 character after END of prev occurrence of last search pattern
 - mb              place a mark (named b) at the current cursor location
 - //<Enter>       go to the beginning of the next occurrence of the last search pattern
 - y`b             yank to the location of the mark named x (note: ` = "back tick")
 - `a              go to the mark named `a`

Example input:

This is a *funky* string

• search for *
• position cursor between two asterisks (or on 2nd asterisk)
• press H

The word funky will be in the yank buffer.

You can use words as delimeters!

Example input:

<br>
Capture all this text.
<br>

• search for <br>
• press H in normal mode when between <br>s (or on 2nd <br>)

You can use regexes, too!

Example input:

<p>
Capture this paragraph.
</p>

• search for <.\?p> (or <\/\{,1}p> to be more correct)
• press H in normal mode when inside the paragraph (or on closing <p> tag)

...

A better approach might be to use a register to remember a delimiter, so you can use this mapping quickly and/or repeatedly. In other words, you could store / or \ or <\?p> in a register and use that to quickly capture text between your stored delimiter.

Answer 3

there is no built-in text object with slash. However there are plugins support customized text-object, like: targets

Answer 4

A recently proposed Vim patch adds a text object for arbitrary matched pairs:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/vim_dev/pZxLAAXxk0M/discussion