How to get visually selected text in VimScript

Question

I\'m able to get the cursor position with getpos(), but I want to retrieve the selected text within a line, that is \'<,\'>.

Answer 1

On Linux, there is a cheap but effective alternative to programming such a GetVisualSelection() function yourself: use the * register!

The * register contains the content of the most recent Visual selection. See :h x11-selection.

In your script you could then simply access @* to get the Visual selection.

let v = @*

Incidentally, * is also a neat little helper in interactive use. For example, in insert mode you can use CTRL-R * to insert what you had selected earlier. No explicit yanking involved.

This works only on operating systems that support the X11 selection mechanism.