vi search/replace special characters

I'm trying to search a file and replace all occurrences of

<82>

with

sometext

using

:%/\<82\>/sometext/g

and it's not working, I've also tried

:%s/[<82>]/sometext/g

what am I doing wrong?

 

Works for me. Are you using some obscure version of vi (rather than vim, for example)?

 

I'm using vim-full with alias vi='vim' in my .bashrc

 

it looks like the problem is that when I say I want to escape the "<" character I have to use

\<

which is also the pattern match for the beginning of a word in vi, does anyone know how to get around that? I'm also looking at perl options.

 

I don't think escaping is necessary.