Re: Use contents of register in search?

On 2/11/15 1:36 PM, Tim Chase wrote:
> On 2015-02-11 13:24, Brian L. Matthews wrote:
>> This is probably one of those "You use vim and don't know how to do
>> that?!?!" things, but I'd like to be able use the contents of a
>> register in a search. I often have some text and want to find out
>> where else that text occurs. I can get the text into a register,
>> but then would like to search for that text.
> You're close. You can use control+R followed by the register-name to
> insert that register at the search prompt. So you can do something
> like
>
> /<C-R>b
>
> to insert the content of the "b" register at the search prompt.
Sweet! That's exactly what I'm looking for. I didn't know about ctrl-R,
that seems like it will be generally useful.
> Note
> that this is interpreted as a regular expression, so if your register
> contains regex metacharacters, you'd have to escape them. Which can
> be done from a mapping with something like
>
> :cnoremap <f4> <C-R>=escape(@b, '.\*/')<cr>
>
> where the ".\*/" is a list of characters to escape.
Yes, I'd expect it to be treated as a regex. Thanks for the mapping
though, I'll definitely use that.
> You can read up more at
>
> :help c_CTRL-R
> :help @=
> :help escape()
>
> if you want the ugly details.
I like ugly details :-), I just couldn't find them in this case.
"ctrl-r" doesn't appear in :help /, or :help register. It does in :help
search, but I don't think in a way that would have told me what I
needed, even if I did know I needed ctrl-R. On the plus side,
cmdline.txt (which is where :help c_CTRL-R takes you), looks quite
useful, I'll have to read the whole file.

Thanks!

Brian

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