vim - set chars to uppercase between parenthesis

let's assume in vim I have following lines:

all what (strong) people have to do is pushing (heavy) weights

over (and over) again in order to gain muscles

and I need to convert words inside parenthesis to uppercase, what is the most convenient way to do so? How do I tell vim it needs to select everything to the first (!) closing parenthesis? So far I came up with

:%s/\s(.*)\s/\U&/g

unfortunately this will uppercase everything between 'strong' and 'heavy' which is not what I want. Any chance to tell vim it should select the chars to the next closing bracket only? (sorry for the silly example, couldn't think of something more sophisticated... or at least vim related... huh)

Try this command in vim:

:%s/\s([^)]*)\s/\U&/g

Using .* is 'greedy': it will match all characters, including the first ) on the first line, and go on until the last ), thus capitalizing everything in between.

Using [^)]* tells the regex engine to look for any characters that are not a ) within (), and capitalize them. Basically, it forces the match to be 'lazy' rather than 'greedy'.

See the sections "Laziness vs Greediness" and "An Alternative to Laziness" in the Regex Tutorial.

This substitution does what you want:

:%s/(.\{-})/\U&/g

Like savanto said, * is greedy: it matches 0 or more, as much as possible, of the preceding atom. Here I just use the opposite of *: {-} to match 0 or more, as few as possible, of the preceding atom.

Remember that if you only need to uppercase the first parenthesis :

Put your cursor inside parenthesis - anywhere - and press gUi(

gU " change to uppercase and wait for a motion
i( " it s for "inside parenthesis"