grepping substitute commands from file into current buffer

As my typical use of vim is applying the substitute command, I decided to maintain a file of previously used such commands, and to grep a selection of them back into my current buffer by providing grep with the first few characters of the pattern for the substitute I wish to make.  For that, I have produced this mapping:

" grep pattern from subs.vim into current buffer  imap <S-F8> \<Esc>xbPlplplplplp:s/\\*$//<CR>d$:r!grep " ^R"" subs.vim<CR>  

Note ^R is the blue text produced by the sequence ^V^R

The imap RHS works as expected if run by hand as ex commands, but fails as a mapping because one superfluous \ (inserted by the plplp sequence) remains after the substitute that should remove them all.

e.g. the sequence /\([ is converted to \/\\\(\[\ instead of the required \/\\\(\[

I have also tried pasting the \s from right to left and stripped superfluous \ from the front end of the line, but got a similar result.  Any suggestions as to why this happens?

--

Graham Lawrence

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