Vim regular expression to match string with prefix and suffix

The command below should work unless “any character” means something different for you than for Vim:

:g/abc.*xyz

• . means “any character except an EOL”.
• * means “any number (including 0) of the previous atom”.
• 1,$ could be shortened to %.
• :global works on the whole buffer by default so you don’t even need the %.
• The closing / is not needed if you don’t follow :g/pattern by a command as in :g/foo/d.