How to replace all word containing a pattern in vim?

Question

I want to replace all words containing a string in a file using vim. how can it be done in vi editor ?

Answer 1

You can use the substitution command like this:

:%s/before/after/g

where

• %s is the substitution
• before is the string to match
• after is the replacement
• g is the global flag (to replace all occurrences)

If you are matching substrings, you can use

:%s/\<\w*substr\w*\>/newword/g

where

• \< matches the word boundary
• \w* matches a word character (0 or more)
• substr is your substring
• > matches the word boundary end
• newword is the new word to replace
• g is the global replace