What does M character mean in Vim

Question

I keep getting  M character in my vimrc and it breaks my configuration

User · Answer

It probably means you ve got carriage returns  different operating systems use different ways of signaling the end of line    Use dos2unix to fix the files or set the fileformats in vim   set ffs unix dos

User · Answer

In Unix it is probably easier to use  tr  command   cat file1 txt   tr   r    n   gt  file2 txt

User · Answer

I ve discovered that I ve been polluting files for weeks due to the fact that my Homebrew Mvim instance was set to use filetype dos  Made the required change in  vimrc

User · Answer

If you didn t specify a different fileformat intentionally  say   e   ff unix for a Windows file   it s likely that the target file has mixed EOLs   For example  if a file has some lines with  lt CR gt  lt NL gt  endings and others with  lt NL gt  endings  and fileformat is set to unix automatically by Vim when reading it   M   lt CR gt   will appear  In such cases  fileformats  note  there s an extra s  comes into play  See  help ffs for the details

User · Answer

Unix uses 0xA for a newline character  Windows uses a combination of two characters  0xD 0xA  0xD is the carriage return character   M happens to be the way vim displays 0xD  0x0D   13  M is the 13th letter in the English alphabet    You can remove all the  M characters by running the following      s  M  g   Where  M is entered by holding down Ctrl and typing v followed by m  and then releasing Ctrl  This is sometimes abbreviated as  V M  but note that you must enter it as described in the previous sentence  rather than typing it out literally   This expression will replace all occurrences of  M with the empty string  i e  nothing   I use this to get rid of  M in files copied from Windows to Unix  Solaris  Linux  OSX

User · Answer

I got a text file originally generated on a Windows Machine by way of a Mac user and needed to import it into a Linux MySQL DB using the load data command   Although VIM displayed the   M  character  none of the above worked for my particular problem  the data would import but was always corrupted in some way  The solution was pretty easy in the end  after much frustration    Solution  Executing dos2unix TWICE on the same file did the trick  Using the file command shows what is happening along the way     file  file txt  file txt  ASCII text  with CRLF  CR line terminators    dos2unix  file txt  dos2unix  converting file file txt to UNIX format       file  file txt  file txt  ASCII text  with CRLF line terminators    dos2unix  file txt  dos2unix  converting file file txt to UNIX format       file  file txt  file txt  ASCII text   And the final version of the file imported perfectly into the database

User · Answer

If it breaks your configuration  and the  M characters are required in mappings  you can simply replace the  M characters by  lt Enter gt  or even  lt C-m gt   both typed as simple character sequences  so 7 and 5 characters  respectively    This is the single recommended  portable way of storing special keycodes in mappings

User · Answer

This is the only thing that worked in my case    e   ff dos   wq

User · Answer

To translate the new line instead of removing it     s  r  r g

User · Answer

Let s say your text file is - file txt  then run this command -  dos2unix file txt    It converts the text file from dos to unix format

User · Answer

You can fix this in vim using    1  s  V M  g   where   is the control character

User · Answer

In FreeBSD  you can clear the  M manually by typing the following     s  Ctrl V  then Ctrl M  then Ctrl M again

User · Answer

s  r  g    worked for me today   But my situation may have been slightly different

User · Answer

I removed them all with sed  sed -i -e  s  r  g   lt filename gt  Could also replace with a different string or character   If there aren t line breaks already for example you can turn  r into  n  sed -i -e  s  r  n g   lt filename gt  Those sed commands work on the GNU Linux version of sed but may need tweaking on BSDs  including macOS

User · Answer

try   s   M   At least this worked for me

[unix] What does ^M character mean in Vim?

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