VIM: substitute with contents of register / lines range

Question

I'm using VIM, and I want to substitute some placeholder text with a long string, that spans several lines, which is already written somewhere else in the file.

Is it possible to replace a pattern with the contents of a register? Something like

:%s/foo/<contents of register A>

Otherwise, is it possible to replace with a range of lines? something like

:%s/foo/<content of lines from 10 to 15>

Answer 1

According to http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search%5Fand%5Freplace It appears:

:%s/foo/\=@a/g

Also, pressing <c-r>a will insert the contents of register a.

Cool -- I never knew that. Good question.

Some other things to do with <c-r>: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/undo.html#CTRL-R

Answer 2

:%s/foo/\=getline(10, 15)/g

:%s/foo/\=join(getline(10, 15))/g