The command ,x/".+"/ would select every string that begins with a double quote, has one character or more after that, and ends with a double quote. If we wanted to select only the characters inside double quotes, we could reject the double quote character by adding the command y/"/ to the previous one. Or we can also only select the quotes by adding x/"/ instead, if we wanted to change double quotes (that surround one or more characters) to single quotes we could do: ,x/".+"/ x/"/ c/'/ or to capitalize all letters inside quotes (with the unix tool tr(1)) we could do: ,x/".+"/ y/"/ | tr [:lower:] [:upper:]