Search for non-ASCII characters

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created September 15, 2004 · complexity basic · author zzapper · version 5.7

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Occasionally when you've pasted into Vim from some other application, you get a pesky visible non-ascii character. You can do a ga command to see what it is, but you might want to search for it or substitute it.

Here's a technique. Place the cursor on the character, then:

yl # yank one character into unnamed buffer
/<C-R>" # pull unnamed buffer contents onto search (that's Control-R)

References

• :help ga
• :help c_CTRL-R

Comments

I tried this on Vim 6.3, can't yank Control-M at all.

I have to do this the regular way: /<C-q>013

Also I noticed, I cannot even do this: %s,$,\r$, it always adds \n, not \r (on windows). I had to use gnu-EMACS to do this substitution on windows!

First of all, I have no problems yanking ^M characters. But, to add a ^M to the end of each line, I find this method easiest:

1. :s;<C-Q><C-M>;;g
2. :set ff=dos
3. :w

You can also use g:

1. :g;\(^\|[^<C-Q><C-M>]\)$;normal A<C-Q><C-Q><C-Q><C-M>
2. :w
3. :e

See Change_end-of-line_format_for_dos-mac-unix for more details.

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Try ^V^M (two keystrokes).

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xxd comes with vim, I use to create binary files. eg. s,\n,\r,g replace all newlines by carriage returns is possible only thru xxd.

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For cleaning up win/dos text files for *nix, there's dos2unix (aka fromdos).

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