In Vim, how can I delete everything between quotes including the quotes?

Question

For example, in the following:

Testing \"deleting\" within quotes

With the cursor inside of deleting, how can I delete the text within the

Answer 1

Keep your cursor in first quotes and press d, then type /"/e It should delete the content between both double quotes as well as quotes. This is applicable for muliple lines as well.

Another way: Keep the cursor in first quotes and type df" It will also delete the text inside quotes and quotes too! Not applicable for multiple lines.

In both the ways, you execute commands in normal mode.

Answer 2

We can use

da"

for your case or di" to delete ONLY the contents inside of ".

It is better to start with text-objects. Writing as an answer for completeness. Excerpt from :h text-objects, given below, suggest two forms i and a

This is a series of commands that can only be used while in Visual mode or after an operator. The commands that start with "a" select "a"n object including white space, the commands starting with "i" select an "inner" object without white space, or just the white space. Thus the "inner" commands always select less text than the "a" commands.

text-objects are useful to other character pair like (), {}, etc. For example, it is useful while changing

if ( i == true ) {
}

to

if (_) {
}

by using ci( or ci).

Answer 3

You can use the following sequence:

da"

Keep in mind this only works on a single line, and will remove any trailing spaces after the last quote.

Edit

As pointed out by @James in the comments below, you can also use the di" sequence (delete inside) to delete the characters within the quotes without deleting the quotes.

You can also use this with ci" (change inside) to remove the characters and switch to insert mode, allowing you to easily replace text within quotes.