My Vim replace with a regex is throwing a `E488: Trailing characters`
I had the same problem.
Only using other delimiters didn't help. So, additionally
I didn't select any row.
And didn't use g for global.
so just
:%s#to_be_replaced#replacement#
did the job. Changed all occurrences of 'to_be_replaced' with 'replacement'.
If you have this when replacing within a selected block of text, it may be because you mistakenly typed %s when you should only type s
I had this happen by selecting a block, typing : and at the prompt :'<,'>, typing %s/something/other/ resulting in :'<,'>%s/something/other/ when the proper syntax is :'<,'>s/something/other/ without the percent.
I had this issue and couldn't make it go away until I found out that the .vimrc file that I had parts that I copied from else where that contained abbreviations, like this for example:
abbrev gc !php artisan generate:controller
That abbreviation would mess up my search and replace commands which usually look like this:
:%s/foo/bar/gc
by expanding that gc into !php artisan generate:controller, except, that it wouldn't do it on the spot/ in real time. The way that I clued in was by looking through the command history (by pressing : and the up arrow) and seeing
:%s/foo/bar/!php artisan generate:controller
So if you're getting trailing character errors no matter what you do I'd look inside
~/.vimrc
and see if you can find the problem there.
When the separator character (/ in your case) between {pattern} and {string} is contained in one of those, it must be escaped with a \. A trick to avoid that is to use a different separator character, e.g. #:
:%s#@\(\w\+\)#<a href="http://www.twitter.com/\1">\0</a>#gc
PS: If it should do what I think it should do, your pattern is wrong; see my correction.