6.7.1 Finding a Character String

A character string is simply one or more characters in a row. It may include letters, numbers, punctuation, special characters, blank spaces, tabs, or carriage returns. A string may be a grammatical word or it may be part of a word.

To find a character string, type / followed by the string you want to search for, and then press Return. vi positions the cursor at the next occurrence of the string. For example, to find the string "meta", type /meta followed by Return.

Type n to go to the next occurrence of the string; type N to go to the previous occurrence.

To search backward in a file, you can use ? instead of /. In this case, the directions of n and N are reversed.

Searches normally are case-sensitive: a search for "china" will not find "China." If you want vi to ignore case during a search, type :set ic. To change it back to the default, case-sensitive mode, type :set noic.

If vi finds the requested string, the cursor will stop at its first occurrence. If the string is not found, vi will display Pattern not found on the last line of the screen.

Certain special characters ( / & ! . ^ * $ \ ?) have special significance to the search process and must be "escaped" when used in a search. To escape a special character, precede it with a backslash (\). For example, to search for the string "anything?" type /anything\? and press Return.

These special characters can be used as commands to the search function, so if you want to search for a string including one or more of these characters, you must indicate this by preceding the character with a backslash. To escape a backslash itself, type \\.