> I have a vim script which I want to use to search & replace a
> part out of a given line. The fields in the line are based on
> field length and the field I want to change starts at position
> 33 and ends after 4 charachter.
>
> A regex search is not appropriet, as the string I am looking
> for may occur in another field in the same line but shoult not
> be changed here. I already tried substitute() and had a look
> to the normal command :s with a subset, but none of them
> worked for me.
I think you may be looking for the zero-width atoms in the "\%#c"
family, so you might search for something like
:%s/\%33cABCD/FGHI/
(there may be an off-by-one error here, so you might have to
adjust that 33 to be 32 or 34 to land on your proper column).
This would replace any "ABCD" starting at column 33 with "FGHI"
There are a family of these:
:help /\%c
:help /\%v
:help /\%l
They're all right next to each other in the help and allow you to
do exactly what you describe, searching for a given item at a
given column offset (there are subtle differences between the %c
and %v varieties).
Hope this helps,
-tim
