regex - How can I make my match non greedy in vim?

Thursday 12 September 2019

I have a big HTML file that has lots of markup that looks like this:


  stuff here

I'm trying to do a Vim search-and-replace to get rid of all class="" and style="" but I'm having trouble making the match ungreedy.

My first attempt was this

%s/style=".*?"//g

but Vim doesn't seem to like the ?. Unfortunately removing the ? makes the match too greedy.

How can I make my match ungreedy?

Answer

Instead of .* use .\{-}.

%s/style=".\{-}"//g

Also, see :help non-greedy

Blog