Linux – Search and replace in VIM results in trailing characters

command-line-argumentslinuxvivim

This is what I am attempting to do:

%s/Article/<h2>Article</h2>/gi

Unfortunately, every time i execute this command through my vim editor, it says:

Trailing characters

To mitigate the above, I executed the following:

%s/\s*\r*$//

And it executes successfully, but when I go back to the original search and replace command, it again reads 'Trailing characters' and does not execute the search and replace operation.

What am I doing wrong here?

Best Solution

The "trailing characters" are in your command, not your document.

Vim thinks that you finished the command at Article</, then considers h2>/gi as the third argument of the substitute command. But those characters aren't all valid for the third argument, so it gives you the error.

To solve this, you need to escape the / character in your substitute.

%s/Article/<h2>Article<\/h2>/gi

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Tab key == 4 spaces and auto-indent after curly braces in Vim

As has been pointed out in a couple of other answers, the preferred method now is NOT to use smartindent, but instead use the following (in your .vimrc):

filetype plugin indent on
" show existing tab with 4 spaces width
set tabstop=4
" when indenting with '>', use 4 spaces width
set shiftwidth=4
" On pressing tab, insert 4 spaces
set expandtab

In your [.vimrc:][1] file:
set smartindent set tabstop=4 set shiftwidth=4 set expandtab

The help files take a bit of time to get used to, but the more you read, the better Vim gets:

:help smartindent

Even better, you can embed these settings in your source for portability:

:help auto-setting

To see your current settings:

:set all

As graywh points out in the comments, smartindent has been replaced by cindent which "Works more cleverly", although still mainly for languages with C-like syntax:

:help C-indenting

Best Solution

Related Solutions

How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Tab key == 4 spaces and auto-indent after curly braces in Vim

Related Question

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.