Substitute the n-th occurrence of a word in vim

Question

I saw other questions dealing with the finding the n-th occurrence of a word/pattern, but I couldn't find how you would actually substitute the n-th occurrence of a pattern in vim. There's the obvious way of hard coding all the occurrences like

:s/.*\(word\).*\(word\).*\(word\).*/.*\1.*\2.*newWord.*/g 

Is there a better way of doing this?

Answer 1

Well, if you do /gc then you can count the number of times it asks you for confirmation, and go ahead with the replacement when you get to the nth :D

Answer 2

You can do this a little more simply by using multiple searches. The empty pattern in the :s/pattern/repl/ command means replace the most recent search result.

:/word//word//word/ s//newWord/
or
:/word//word/ s/word/newWord/

You could then repeat this multiple times by doing @:, or even 10@: to repeat the command 10 more times.

Alternatively, if I were doing this interactively I would do something like:

3/word
:s//newWord/r

That would find the third occurrence of word and then perform a substitution.

Answer 3

For information,

s/\%(\(pattern\).\{-}\)\{41}\zs\1/2/

also works to replace 42th occurrence. However, I prefer the solution given by John Kugelman which is more simple -- even if it will not limit itself to the current line.