VI Regular Expressions - Replacing using current line number

Question

I'm not sure it's possible or not, but one of the things I find I need to do often is to replace the contents of the file, but I want to use the current line number as a replacement option. So if I had a file like:

This is text to replace XX 
This is text to replace XX 
This is text to replace XX

I would want to be able to run a regex that would turn that file into:

This is text to replace 1
This is text to replace 2
This is text to replace 3

I've looked around, but I can't seem to find any way of doing this. Is this possible? Does anyone know of a simple way to approach this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

:help sub-replace-expression

You can construct a replace expression like:

:s@ xx$@\=" " . line(".")@

... Which works for me.