Possible Duplicate:
Case preserving substitute in Vim
Is it possible to do a search and replace in vim that preserves the case of the search term? This was a useful feature in intelliJ that I miss.
For instance, something like:
:s/[uU]ser/[pP]erson/ (obviously, this doesn't work)
Such that:
user->person
User->Person
Another example with multiple characters to preserve:
:s/[mM]y[uU]ser/[tT]his[pP]erson/g
Such that:
myuser->thisperson
myUser->thisPerson
MyUser->ThisPerson
There are a few approaches that can be taken. If you want to stick with basic Vim functionality, you can do something like
:%s/[uU]ser/\=submatch(0) ==# 'user' ? 'person' : 'Person'/g
If you have Vim built with Perl bindings, you can make use of :perldo
. Depending on the length of the matching/replacing words and where the case you want to preserve is, this may or may not work.
:perldo s/(user)/"\L$1" ^ $1 ^ 'person'/ieg
Or you can make use of one of the various scripts that implement such functionality.
There's a plugin for vim: keepcase.vim
Redone the answer after giving it some thought ;-)
:s@\([Uu]\)ser@\=((submatch(1)=="U")?"P":"p")."erson"@gc
Of course it can be improved, but the idea stays.