Finding exact match in vim

Question

Using `/` or `?` enables to find a match for a word in vim. But how can I find an exact match? For example, my text contains the following words: `a aa aaa aaaa aa` and I type `/aa` This will find all the strings containing the pattern aa, but what if I want to find exactly `aa` and not `aaaa aaaa`?

Accepted Answer

To find a single, standalone `aa` (not `a`, `aaa`, ...), you need to assert no match of that character both before and afterwards. This is done with negative lookbehind (`\@<!` in Vim's regular expression syntax) and lookahead (`\@!`) enclosing the match itself (`a\{2}`):

```
/\%(a\)\@<!a\{2}\%(a\)\@!/
```

Simplification

Those assertions are hard to type, if the border around the match is also a non-keyword / keyword border, you can use the shorter `\<\a\{2}\>` assertions (as in LSchueler's answer), but this doesn't work in the general case, e.g. with `xaax`.

Finding exact match in vim

Solution

Problem