Vim - delete the text between pattern1 and pattern2

[boukli]

Hi all,

I'm trying to a edit a big file, in which there are, on each line, more than one occurrence of "pattern1" and "pattern2", as follows :

bababa pattern1 bibibi pattern2 bobobo pattern1 bebebe pattern2 bububu etc.

I used Vim with the following command :

:%s/pattern1.*pattern2//

The effect of it is that it takes the first occurrence of pattern1, and delete all that follows until the last occurrence of pattern2 is reached. But what I want is to delete the text between each "pattern1-pattern2", so that the example above becomes :

bababa bobobo bububu

How can I do this ?

[MadCow108]

by default regex are usually try to match as much as possible, you need a non-greedy or eager match
in vim this works like this
%s/pattern1.\{-}pattern2//g

see :help non-greedy

[boukli]

Thank you, it works like a charm !

I will study the documentation to understand how it works.