Replacing CDATA sections using Vim editor

Here’s a quick regular expression for finding and replacing CDATA sections in an XML file, using Vim editor. ViM’s regex syntax is slightly different than Perl’s and I had to spend a little while to come up with this expression. Hope this helps somebody, some day.

%s/<!\[CDATA\_.\{-}\]\]>//c

Here’s the key items explained:

• \_ Matches any single character or the end-of-line.
• \{-} Matches zero or more of the preceding atom, as few times as possible.
• /c Confirm before replace, you can as well use /g to do at one shot without any confirmation.

Tags: hack, regex, vi, vim

This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2011 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.