Global replace in vi with no escape required

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

I want to replace a string of words but i dont want to worry about escaping the characters in that string .

For e.g. If my string is "work/" and i want to replace it with "nowork" .I have to type

%s/work\//nowork/g

Is there a way by which I wont need to worry about the data in my string ?

10x
Sachin

2

There is no way to avoid never having to escape certain characters but it is possible to reduce or eliminate the number of characters you have to escape.

For example, you could have avoided escaping the forward slash in your example by using a '|' as the delimiter, i.e.

%s|work/|nowork|g

As far as I know, any character except a backslash or newline can be used instead of a slash to delimit the find and the replacement.