Does anyone know the command to extract only the words with a certain symbol in front of them from a text file. I know the command should look something like this: %s/\v(.*)(*@,\d)(.*)/\2 if I wanted to extract words only having @ in front of them. However, I’m getting an error “E59: invalid character after @" What is going wrong?

I am not sure your question is specific enough (better definition of "move" and "in front of"), and your "command" (regular expression) does not seem to make much sense, but I suspect that sed or awk would be more what you are looking for.

It would help f you could be a little more exact in what you need, and maybe give an example or two of what you want to extract and how it should appear in the new file.

I'm trying to do this in Vim, which I neglected to directly mention in the post. Seems like it should be simple. What do you think is going wrong? So if the orignal file was a 400 page text file with 20 email addresses in it on random pages, and I only wanted to extract the 20 email addresses. How can I get Vim to just spit out the email addresses from that text file?

Thanks

You were right! awk did a beautiful job of separating everything into a list in the terminal. I copied that list into a spreadsheet and filtered it. I will be looking into more of what awk can do. What a powerful little program! Thank you!

An old thread and solved as well, but at least, I can say what was wrong with the pattern. In Vim regular expressions, \v means very magic, it allows using any non-alphanumeric RE metacharacters without preceding backslash. Non-alphanumeric is the key word here. Not only parentheses and braces, but really anything and everything: e.g. < and > instead of \< and \> for word boundaries, etc.

Now, \@ happens to be a metacharacter for lookarounds in Vim regular expressions. So, after \v Vim treats a bare @ as such metacharacter, but doesn't see the correct syntax for it: e.g. @= for positive lookahead, @! for negative lookahead, and so on. Thus, the error message.

BTW, Vim error codes are tags in Vim help. To find out what this error is about, type :h e59 from inside Vim.