Is it possible to alias regexp substrings in vim?

Question

I want to find and replace pattern containing floating point numbers using vim. I found this nice regular expression for such numbers:

 [-+]?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+([eE][-+]?[0-9]+)?

This expression makes any regex it appears in quite long and confusing. Also I would probably want to use it quite often.

Is there some way that vim can learn this substring as an alias so that I can just search for something like Value: +[[:float:]] instead of Value: +[-+]?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+([eE][-+]?[0-9]+)??

Answer 1

While I don't think what you want exists, abbreviations should help you, here.

cabbrev float [-+]?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+([eE][-+]?[0-9]+)?

Practically, you'll use it like this:

:
:s/
:s/float/
:s/[-+]?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+([eE][-+]?[0-9]+)?/