Can I substitute multiple items in a single regular expression in VIM or Perl?

Question

Let\'s say I have string \"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog\" can I change this to \"The slow brown fox jumps over the energetic dog\" with one regular expression

Answer 1

You can do the following.

:%s/quick\(.*\)lazy/slow\1energetic

The trick is to use the parens to match the text between the two words. You can then reference this text in the substitution string by using \1. You can also use \2 for the second matched paren expression and so on. This allows you to replace multiple words without disturbing the text inbetween.