vim regex for python2 print to python3

Question

So say I have a python v2.7 file with some code like this:

print 'asdf'
print 'hi mom!'

But I want to run it in python3, I'll need to add those parenthesis to them like so:

print('asdf')
print('hi mom!')

I was trying to use the following regex in vim to solve the problem, but it wasn't working:

:%s/print\ '.*'/print('\1')/gc

It just gave me print functions (with parenthesis) that had empty strings. Any help is appreciated; thanks.

Answer 1

This would work for your examples

:%s/print \('.*'\)/print(\1)/g

1. You don't need to escape the space.
2. You don't actually capture anything in parenthesis so the \1 is an empty string in your regex.

But I also recommend using 2to3