I've got a file with a whole heap of words of the form 'foo' and i want to change them to Literal('foo'). The following :s command :%s/'.*'/Literal('.*')/gci finds the things i want to change but then it replaces them all with Literal('.*') rather than Literal('foo')
Examples:
I get:
'_' -> Literal('.*')
'dog' -> Literal('.*')
I want:
'_' -> Literal('_')
'dog' -> Literal('dog')
You almost have it
:%s/\('.*'\)/Literal(\1)/gci
You need to save the match and reference it in the replace. You were inserting a literal (no pun) .* in the replace.
An alternative to casey's answer with explicit capturing is to restrict the match with \zs (start) and \ze (end), to assert that the single quotes are there, but don't include them. Then, you can just refer to the match in the replacement part with &:
:%s/'\zs.*\ze'/Literal(&)/gci
