Extract and use a part of string with a regex in GVIM

Question

I've got a string:

doCall(valA, val.valB);

Using a regex in GVIM I would like to change this to:

valA = doCall(valA, val.valB);

How would I go about doing this? I use %s for basic regex search and replace in GVIM, but this a bit different from my normal usages.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use this:

%s/\vdoCall\(<(\w*)>,/\1 = doCall(\1,/

\v enables “more magic” in regular expressions – not strictly necessary here but I usually use it to make the expressions simpler. <…> matches word boundaries and the in-between part matches the first parameter and puts it in the first capture group. The replacement uses \1 to access that capture group and insert into the right two places.