match wordchar and/or dot string of anylength

Question

This matches a word /\w\+
This matches a any number of dots /\.\+

Why doesn't this match any number of words combined by dots? /[\w\.]\+ ?

The w seems to be matching actual 'w's instead of a word character, whether I escape it or not.

`\w` has a different meaning inside a [character class](http://www.regular-expressions.info/refcharclass.html). — vrmc, Jun 09 '15 at 19:00
@sln good point. I should've linked to something vim-specific like [this](http://vimregex.com/#metacharacters). — vrmc, Jun 09 '15 at 19:07

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:29

See "PREDEFINED RANGES" in Vim documentation: usr_27:

Note:
Using these predefined ranges works a lot faster than the character range it stands for.
These items can not be used inside []. Thus [\d\l] does NOT work to match a digit or lowercase alpha. Use \(\d\|\l\) instead.

So, your work-around would be /[a-zA-Z\.]\+ if you want to exclude digits and underscore that are matched with \w, or /[a-zA-Z0-9_\.]\+ to emulate the \w functionality. If POSIX bracketed classes are supported, /[[:alpha:]\.]\+ (or for full emulation, /[[:alpha:][:digit:]_\.]\+) is also an option.

There are also other ways, see this SO post where 2 other alternatives are suggested:

A non-capturing sub-expression\%(\w\|\.\)\+
A sequence of optionally matched atoms \%[\w\.]\+

match wordchar and/or dot string of anylength

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