Rubenerd: Curly bracket substitution in sed, nvi, Vim

What is it they say about regular expressions? I got caught out making a basic mistake substituting curling brackets at the start of lines in a text file, so I thought I’d share it.

Here was my first attempt in FreeBSD nvi, escaping the bracket:

:%s/^\{//
==> RE error: repetition-operator operand invalid.

Hmm, weird. The same happened with nvi installed from MacPorts on my work laptop. So I tried Vim:

:%s/^\{//
==> E866: (NFA regexp) Misplaced {
==> E64: \{ follows nothing
==> E476: Invalid command
==> Press ENTER or type command to continue

This should be simple, what was I doing wrong? I tried sed to mimic what I was doing above:

$ sed -i '' -e 's/^\{//' $_FILE
==> sed: 1: "s/^\{\"id\"\:\"//
==> ": RE error: invalid repetition count(s)

Can you see the problem?

Not to get all Malcolm Gladwell on you, but turns out I shouldn’t have been escaping the curly bracket. So doing this was sufficient:

%s/^{//

I’m going to dub this premature escaping. Or maybe Ruben shouldn’t do early morning regex without coffee and/or sufficient sleep.

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