How do I swap the left hand and right hand sides of a C/C++ assignment statement in gvim?

To be honest, I actually have a solution for this, but Google search finds so many great tips for me from this site, that开发者_Python百科 I had to contribute something back. Here is what I came up with. For a single line:

s/^\(\s\+\)\(.*\) = \(.*\);/\1\3 = \2;/

For multiple lines starting at the current line, add .,.+<line count>. For example:

.,.+28s/^\(\s\+\)\(.*\) = \(.*\);/\1\3 = \2;/

will substitute on the current line and the following 28 lines. This should also work for Java and Perl. For Python, omit the ending semicolon from the pattern and substitution (unless you're the sort who uses the optional semicolon).

After typing all that, I find I do have a question. Is there a way to simplify it so I don't have so many escape characters?

Use 'very magic': add \v to the expression. See :help magic. Basically, it mean that all non-alphanumeric characters have special (i.e. regular expression operator meanings) unless escaped, which means that they do not need to be escaped in your usage above.

Using \v at the start of your regex can help make it more readable. \v means "very magic", that all characters have are special except those in the sets '0'-'9', 'a'-'z', 'A'-'Z' and '_'.

So your first example could be converted like so:

s/\v^(\s+)(.*) \= (.*)\;/\1\3 = \2\;/

The = and the ; now need to be escaped to identify them as literals but all the other high-ASCII chars don't.