To comment out matches in Vim

Question

I would like to comment out each line which has the following match

^.*pdf

You need to somehow consider the situation by globbing. I try to make an object of the match by brackets.

I run unsuccessfully the following commands

%s/^(.*pdf)/^%$1/

and

%s/^(.*pdf)/^(%*$1)/

and

%s/^(.*pdf)/^%\$1/

How can you comment out the matches in Vim?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you exactly mean by "comment out" (are comments indicated by hashes, or what?) but it looks like what you want is to prepend a % sign. In that case,

:g/pdf/s/^/%/

should work ("on all lines containing 'pdf', change the start of the line to a %" is how you could read it).

Answer 2

Hmm, I think you can get it working with:

:%s/^\(.*pdf\)/#\1/

or if you want to prepend '%' instead of '#':

:%s/^\(.*pdf\)/%\1/