VIM search and replace special characters

vim is a wonderful text editor. Wait. What? emacs? who uses that anyhow… 😉

I recently needed to do a quick search and replace on ALL punctuation within a file and decided to use vim in combination with regex to complete the task and post a quick how-to here.

First, open the text file with vim as you normally would (kinda required right?)

Now use the vim command line by invoking the colon :.

Now use the regex search (see command below) and note that you need to use the \ escape character or you’re going to end up with everything replaced vs just your punctuation (yes, that is the voice of experience).

:%s/\./\_/g

In the above example all periods are replaced with underscores while leaving all other aspects of the file untouched. Simple right?