How to convert the M linebreak to normal linebreak in a file opened in vim

Question

vim shows on every line ending  M  How I do to replace this with a  normal  linebreak

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Over a serial console all the vi and sed solutions didn t work for me  I had to   cat inputfilename   tr -d   r   gt  outputfilename

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On Linux and Mac OS  the following works     s  V M  V M g   where  V M means type Ctrl V  then Ctrl M   Note  on Windows you probably want to use  Q instead of  V  since by default  V is mapped to paste text

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This worked for me      s  r n  r

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Use one of these commands     s  r  g   Or    s  r   n    1 g

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Ctrl M minimizes my window  but Ctrl Enter actually inserts a  M character  I also had to be sure not to lift off the Ctrl key between presses   So the solution for me was     s  lt Ctrl-V gt  lt Ctrl-Enter gt   r g   Where  lt Ctrl-V gt  lt Ctrl-Enter gt  means to press and hold Ctrl  press and release V  press and release Enter  and then release Ctrl   If you are working on a Windows-generated file  The above solution will add an additional line between existing lines  because there is already an invisible  r after the  M   To prevent this  you want to delete the  M characters without replacing them     s  lt Ctrl-V gt  lt Ctrl-Enter gt   g   Where   means  in this buffer   s means  substitute     means   find  the following pattern    lt Ctrl-V gt  lt Ctrl-Enter gt  refers to the keys to press to get the  M character  see above      means  with nothing   or   with the pattern between these two slashes  which is empty    and g is a flag meaning  globally   as opposed to the first occurrence in a line

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What about just     s  r  g  That totally worked for me   What this does is just to clean the end of line of all lines  it removes the  M and that s it

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To save keystrokes  you can avoid typing Ctrl VCtrl M by placing this in a mapping  Just open a file containing a  M character  yank it  and paste it into a line like this in your  vimrc   nnoremap  lt Leader gt d   s  M  g lt CR gt

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Command   s  lt Ctrl-V gt  lt Ctrl-M gt   r g  Where  lt Ctrl-V gt  lt Ctrl-M gt  means type Ctrl V then Ctrl M    Explanation   s  substitute      all lines  lt Ctrl-V gt  lt Ctrl-M gt    M characters  the Ctrl-V is a Vim way of writing the Ctrl   character and Ctrl-M writes the M after the regular expression  resulting to  M special character    r   with new line   r  g  And do it globally  not just the first occurrence on the line

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This worked for me    Set file format to unix   n line ending  save the file   So in vim    set ff unix  w

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Alternatively  there are open-source utilities called dos2unix and unix2dos available that do this very thing   On a linux system they are probably installed by default  for a windows system you can download them from http   www bastet com  amongst others

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M gives unwanted line breaks  To handle this we can use the sed command as follows   sed  s  r  g

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On Solaris     s  lt CTRL V gt  lt CTRL M gt   g  that is     s  M  g  That means       all lines  s   substitute   M   what you desire to substitute      replace with nothing g   globally  not only the first occurrance

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Just removeset binary in your  vimrc

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In my case    Nothing above worked  I had a CSV file copied to Linux machine from my mac and I used all the above commands but nothing helped but the below one  tr   015    n   lt  inputfile  gt  outputfile   I had a file in which  M characters were sandwitched between lines something like below  Audi A4 35 TFSi Premium  CAAUA4TP MB01BNKT6TG TRO WBFB 500 Trico CARS Audi A4 35 TFSi Premium  CAAUA4TP MB01BNKTG0A TRO WB T500 Trico

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g  M s    g   If you type  M using Shift 6 Caps M it won t accept   You need to type ctrl v ctrl m

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None of these worked for me  so I tried this  which worked   type   s   press CTRL-VCTRL-M  type   g  press Enter  So the overall command in Vim shoud look like   s  M  g  What this does    s  find and replace    M   that symbol     with no chars  g  globally

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Without needing to use Ctrl        s  r

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in order to get the  M character to match I had to visually select it and then use the OS copy to clipboard command to retrieve it   You can test it by doing a search for the character before trying the replace command     M   should select the first bad line    s  M  r g   will replace all the errant  M with carriage returns   This is as functions in MacVim  which is based on gvim 7   EDIT   Having this problem again on my Windows 10 machine  which has Ubuntu for Windows  and I think this is causing fileformat issues for vim  In this case changing the ff to unix  mac  or dos did nothing other than to change the  M to  J and back again   The solution in this case     s  r    g   s     g   The reason I went this route is because I wanted to ensure I was being non-destructive with my file  I could have   s  r   g but that would have deleted the carriage returns right out  and could have had unexpected results  Instead we convert the singular CR character  here a  M character  into a space  and then remove all spaces at the end of lines  which for me is a desirable result regardless   Sorry for reviving an old question that has long since been answered  but there seemed to be some confusion afoot and I thought I d help clear some of that up since this is coming up high in google searches

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use dos2unix utility if the file was created on windows   use mac2unix utility if the file was created on mac

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I did this with sed   sed -i -e  s  r  n g  filename

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I ve spent an afternoon struggling with  n ctrl-v 012  both of which supply me with null     amp  laboured through this thread until I reached metagrapher s    r worked fine for me         s      r g   turned something like this      blacklist-extra i386  0 4 1  0 4 1 nmu1   libmount1 i386  2 20 1-5 1  2 20 1    -5 2   libblkid1 i386  2 20 1-5 1  2 20 1-5 2   libapt-pkg4 12 i386  0 9 7 4      0 9 7 5   nmap i386  6 00-0 1  6 00-0 2   libsane-common i386  1 0 22-7 3    into something like this      26  libwv-1 2-4 i386  1 2 9-3  automatic       27  openjdk-6-jre-headless i386  6b24-1 11 4-3  automatic       28  jed i386  0 99 19-2 1      Magic   I am profoundly grateful

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To use sed on MacOS  do this   sed -i bak   s  r     lt filename gt    Explanation  The   STRING  syntax here pertains to the bash shell  Macs don t treat  r as special character  By quoting the command string in     you re telling the shell to replace  r with the actual  r character specified in the ANSI-C standard

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In vim  use command           s  r n  r g   Where you want to search and replace       r n   into      r   and the       g   is for global  Note that this is the same as the answer by  ContextSwitch but with the gobal flag

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Simple thing that worked for me   dos2unix   filename

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Or instead of using vim you can just fix the line breaks using this command  fromdos  lt filename txt gt    Hope it helps

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sed s  M  g file1 txt  gt  file2 txt   where  M is typed by simultaneously pressing the 3 keys  ctrl   v   m

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A file I had created with BBEdit seen in MacVim was displaying a bunch of  M line returns instead of regular ones  The following string replace solved the issue - hope this helps     s  r  r g   It s interesting because I m replacing line breaks with the same character  but I suppose Vim just needs to get a fresh  r to display correctly  I d be interested to know the underlying mechanics of why this works

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This is the only thing that worked for me       e   ff dos   Found it at  http   vim wikia com wiki File format

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M is retrieved by Ctrl V and M  so do  s  M  g

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There are many other answers to this question  but still  the following works best for me  as I needed a command line solution   vim -u NONE -c  e   ff dos  -c  w   ff unix  -c q myfile   Explanation    Without loading any  vimrc files  open myfile Run  e   ff dos to force a reload of the entire file as dos line endings  Run  w   ff unix to write the file using unix line endings Quit vim

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Within vim  look at the file format     DOS or Unix    set filetype unix   set fileformat unix  The file will be written back without carriage return  CR   M  characters

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First  use  set ff  to figure out the file format your file is    I guess it could be unix  then the problem is your file was created with fileformat dos adding   M J  to the line end but read with flieformat unix only removing the   J  from the line end  leaving the   M  there    Just input  e   ff dos in Vim command line to change your file s format from unix to dos  It should solve the problem  If not    s  r  g should help you out

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None of these suggestions were working for me having managed to get a load of  M line breaks while working with both vim and eclipse  I suspect that I encountered an outside case but in case it helps anyone I did     s     g   And it sorted out my problem

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This function preserves the list of jumps  fun  Dos2unixFunction   let  s    let l   line      let c   col      try     set ff unix     w        s   x0d   e catch  E32       echo  Sorry  the file is not saved   endtry let     s call cursor l  c  endfun com  Dos2Unix keepjumps call Dos2unixFunction

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When in windows  try   s  lt C-Q gt  lt C-M gt  g

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None of the above worked for me   substitution on  r   M  ctrl-v-ctrl-m   I used copy and paste to paste my text into a new file    If you have macros that interfere  you can try  set paste before the paste operation and  set nopaste after

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In command mode in VIM   e   ff dos   setl ff unix   up  e   ff dos - force open file in dos format  setl ff unix - convert file to unix format  up - save file only when has been modified

[vim] How to convert the ^M linebreak to 'normal' linebreak in a file opened in vim?

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