[PLUG] vim regex lazy/minimal-matching?

[Daniel Logghe]

Matt Alexander wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Matt Alexander wrote:
> 
> 
>>In Perl I can use ? to stop after the first match.
>>
>>Does anyone know how to do the same type of lazy/minimal-matching in vim?
> 
> 
> 
> OK...  here's a little more info on my problem...
> 
> Here's a line of text...
> 
> something.  something.  something else.  maybe something else too.  yep.
> 
> I don't know what the text is before each period, and I don't know how
> many periods will appear, but after the first period that I encounter I
> want to insert a tab after that period.  The following does not work:
> 
> :%s/\(^.*\.\)/\1\t/
> 
> The problem with this is that it would match everything up to the very
> last period and would substitute the tab at the end.  Yes, I could use
> Perl, but I encounter this problem all the time and I'd like to be able to
> do it from within vim.
> Thanks,
> ~M


I think what you're after in vim is \{-} so your pattern above would be:
:%s/\(^.{-}\.\)/\1\t/