How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Question

I m trying to replace each   in the current file by a new line     s    n g    But it inserts what looks like a    instead of an actual newline  The file is not in DOS mode or anything   What should I do   If you are curious  like me  check the question Why is  r a newline for Vim  as well

User · Answer

Here s the answer that worked for me  From this guy   ----quoting Use the vi editor to insert a newline char in replace    Something else I have to do and cannot remember and then have to look up   In vi  to insert a newline character in a search and replace  do the following     s look for replace with M g   The command above would replace all instances of    look for    with    replace with n     with  n meaning newline    To get the     M     enter the key combination Ctrl   V  and then after that  release all keys  press the Enter key

User · Answer

With Vim on Windows  use Ctrl   Q in place of Ctrl   V

User · Answer

You need to use     s    M g   To get the  M character  press Ctrl   v followed by Enter

User · Answer

Here s the trick  First  set your Vi m  session to allow pattern matching with special characters  i e   newline   It s probably worth putting this line in your  vimrc or  exrc file   set magic  Next  do   s     M g  To get the  M character  type Ctrl   V and hit Enter  Under Windows  do Ctrl   Q  Enter  The only way I can remember these is by remembering how little sense they make   A  What would be the worst control-character to use to represent a newline  B  Either q  because it usually means  quot Quit quot   or v because it would be so easy to type Ctrl   C by mistake and kill the editor  A  Make it so

User · Answer

Here s the answer that worked for me  From this guy   ----quoting Use the vi editor to insert a newline char in replace    Something else I have to do and cannot remember and then have to look up   In vi  to insert a newline character in a search and replace  do the following     s look for replace with M g   The command above would replace all instances of    look for    with    replace with n     with  n meaning newline    To get the     M     enter the key combination Ctrl   V  and then after that  release all keys  press the Enter key

User · Answer

With Vim on Windows  use Ctrl   Q in place of Ctrl   V

User · Answer

This is the best answer for the way I think  but it would have been nicer in a table   Why is  r a newline for Vim   So  rewording   You need to use  r to use a line feed  ASCII 0x0A  the Unix newline  in a regex replacement  but that is peculiar to the replacement - you should normally continue to expect to use  n for line feed and  r for carriage return   This is because Vim used  n in a replacement to mean the NIL character  ASCII 0x00   You might have expected NIL to have been  0 instead  freeing  n for its usual use for line feed  but  0 already has a meaning in regex replacements  so it was shifted to  n  Hence then going further to also shift the newline from  n to  r  which in a regex pattern is the carriage return character  ASCII 0x0D     Character                  ASCII code   C representation   Regex match   Regex replacement ------------------------- ------------ ------------------ ------------- ------------------------ nil                        0x00          0                  0             n line feed  Unix newline    0x0a          n                  n             r carriage return            0x0d          r                  r             lt unknown gt    NB   M  Ctrl   V Ctrl   M on Linux  inserts a newline when used in a regex replacement rather than a carriage return as others have advised  I just tried it    Also note that Vim will translate the line feed character when it saves to file based on its file format settings and that might confuse matters

User · Answer

r can do the work here for you

User · Answer

r can do the work here for you

User · Answer

From Eclipse  the  M characters can be embedded in a line  and you want to convert them to newlines    s  r  r g

User · Answer

If you need to do it for a whole file  it was also suggested to me that you could try from the command line   sed  s   n  n g  file  gt  newfile

User · Answer

Use  r instead of  n  Substituting by  n inserts a null character into the text  To get a newline  use  r  When searching for a newline  you   d still use  n  however  This asymmetry is due to the fact that  n and  r do slightly different things   n matches an end of line  newline   whereas  r matches a carriage return  On the other hand  in substitutions  n inserts a null character whereas  r inserts a newline  more precisely  it   s treated as the input CR   Here   s a small  non-interactive example to illustrate this  using the Vim command line feature  in other words  you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it   xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file  echo bar  gt  test  echo  Before    xxd test   gt  output txt vim test   s b  n     s a  r    wq  echo  After    xxd test   gt  gt  output txt more output txt   Before  0000000  6261 720a                                bar  After  0000000  000a 720a                                  r   In other words   n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text   r has inserted the byte 0x0a

User · Answer

With Vim on Windows  use Ctrl   Q in place of Ctrl   V

User · Answer

You need to use     s    M g   To get the  M character  press Ctrl   v followed by Enter

User · Answer

You need to use     s    M g   To get the  M character  press Ctrl   v followed by Enter

User · Answer

Use  r instead of  n  Substituting by  n inserts a null character into the text  To get a newline  use  r  When searching for a newline  you   d still use  n  however  This asymmetry is due to the fact that  n and  r do slightly different things   n matches an end of line  newline   whereas  r matches a carriage return  On the other hand  in substitutions  n inserts a null character whereas  r inserts a newline  more precisely  it   s treated as the input CR   Here   s a small  non-interactive example to illustrate this  using the Vim command line feature  in other words  you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it   xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file  echo bar  gt  test  echo  Before    xxd test   gt  output txt vim test   s b  n     s a  r    wq  echo  After    xxd test   gt  gt  output txt more output txt   Before  0000000  6261 720a                                bar  After  0000000  000a 720a                                  r   In other words   n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text   r has inserted the byte 0x0a

User · Answer

You need to use     s    M g   To get the  M character  press Ctrl   v followed by Enter

User · Answer

From Eclipse  the  M characters can be embedded in a line  and you want to convert them to newlines    s  r  r g

User · Answer

r can do the work here for you

User · Answer

This is the best answer for the way I think  but it would have been nicer in a table   Why is  r a newline for Vim   So  rewording   You need to use  r to use a line feed  ASCII 0x0A  the Unix newline  in a regex replacement  but that is peculiar to the replacement - you should normally continue to expect to use  n for line feed and  r for carriage return   This is because Vim used  n in a replacement to mean the NIL character  ASCII 0x00   You might have expected NIL to have been  0 instead  freeing  n for its usual use for line feed  but  0 already has a meaning in regex replacements  so it was shifted to  n  Hence then going further to also shift the newline from  n to  r  which in a regex pattern is the carriage return character  ASCII 0x0D     Character                  ASCII code   C representation   Regex match   Regex replacement ------------------------- ------------ ------------------ ------------- ------------------------ nil                        0x00          0                  0             n line feed  Unix newline    0x0a          n                  n             r carriage return            0x0d          r                  r             lt unknown gt    NB   M  Ctrl   V Ctrl   M on Linux  inserts a newline when used in a regex replacement rather than a carriage return as others have advised  I just tried it    Also note that Vim will translate the line feed character when it saves to file based on its file format settings and that might confuse matters

User · Answer

But if one has to substitute  then the following thing works     s  n  r   - r g   In the above  every next line is substituted with next line  and then  - and again a new line  This is used in wiki tables   If the text is as follows   line1 line2 line3   It is changed to  line1  - line2  - line3

User · Answer

Here s the trick  First  set your Vi m  session to allow pattern matching with special characters  i e   newline   It s probably worth putting this line in your  vimrc or  exrc file   set magic  Next  do   s     M g  To get the  M character  type Ctrl   V and hit Enter  Under Windows  do Ctrl   Q  Enter  The only way I can remember these is by remembering how little sense they make   A  What would be the worst control-character to use to represent a newline  B  Either q  because it usually means  quot Quit quot   or v because it would be so easy to type Ctrl   C by mistake and kill the editor  A  Make it so

User · Answer

r can do the work here for you

User · Answer

Use  r instead of  n  Substituting by  n inserts a null character into the text  To get a newline  use  r  When searching for a newline  you   d still use  n  however  This asymmetry is due to the fact that  n and  r do slightly different things   n matches an end of line  newline   whereas  r matches a carriage return  On the other hand  in substitutions  n inserts a null character whereas  r inserts a newline  more precisely  it   s treated as the input CR   Here   s a small  non-interactive example to illustrate this  using the Vim command line feature  in other words  you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it   xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file  echo bar  gt  test  echo  Before    xxd test   gt  output txt vim test   s b  n     s a  r    wq  echo  After    xxd test   gt  gt  output txt more output txt   Before  0000000  6261 720a                                bar  After  0000000  000a 720a                                  r   In other words   n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text   r has inserted the byte 0x0a

User · Answer

If you need to do it for a whole file  it was also suggested to me that you could try from the command line   sed  s   n  n g  file  gt  newfile

User · Answer

But if one has to substitute  then the following thing works     s  n  r   - r g   In the above  every next line is substituted with next line  and then  - and again a new line  This is used in wiki tables   If the text is as follows   line1 line2 line3   It is changed to  line1  - line2  - line3

User · Answer

Use  r instead of  n  Substituting by  n inserts a null character into the text  To get a newline  use  r  When searching for a newline  you   d still use  n  however  This asymmetry is due to the fact that  n and  r do slightly different things   n matches an end of line  newline   whereas  r matches a carriage return  On the other hand  in substitutions  n inserts a null character whereas  r inserts a newline  more precisely  it   s treated as the input CR   Here   s a small  non-interactive example to illustrate this  using the Vim command line feature  in other words  you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it   xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file  echo bar  gt  test  echo  Before    xxd test   gt  output txt vim test   s b  n     s a  r    wq  echo  After    xxd test   gt  gt  output txt more output txt   Before  0000000  6261 720a                                bar  After  0000000  000a 720a                                  r   In other words   n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text   r has inserted the byte 0x0a

User · Answer

In the syntax s foo bar   r and  n have different meanings  depending on context   Short  For foo   r     quot carriage return quot   CR    M   n    matches  quot line feed quot   LF  on Linux Mac  and CRLF on Windows For bar   r    produces LF on Linux Mac  CRLF on Windows  n     quot null byte quot   NUL       When editing files in linux  i e  on a webserver  that were initially created in a windows environment and uploaded  i e  FTP SFTP  - all the  M s you see in vim  are the CR s which linux does not translate as it uses only LF s to depict a line break   Longer  with ASCII numbers    NUL    0x00    0    Ctrl           shown in vim LF    0x0A    10    Ctrl   J CR    0x0D    13    Ctrl   M     M shown in vim Here is a list of the ASCII control characters  Insert them in Vim via Ctrl   V Ctrl   ---key---  In Bash or the other Unix Linux shells  just type Ctrl   ---key---  Try Ctrl   M in Bash  It s the same as hitting Enter  as the shell realizes what is meant  even though Linux systems use line feeds for line delimiting  To insert literal s in bash  prepending them with Ctrl   V will also work  Try in Bash  echo    33 1mcolored    0mnot colored   This uses ANSI escape sequences  Insert the two    s via Ctrl   V  Esc  You might also try Ctrl   V Ctrl   M  Enter  which will give you this  bash     r   command not found  Remember the  r from above    gt  This ASCII control characters list is different from a complete ASCII symbol table  in that the control characters  which are inserted into a console pseudoterminal Vim via the Ctrl key  haha   can be found there  Whereas in C and most other languages  you usually use the octal codes to represent these  characters   If you really want to know where all this comes from  The TTY demystified  This is the best link you will come across about this topic  but beware  There be dragons   TL DR Usually foo    n  and bar    r

User · Answer

In the syntax s foo bar   r and  n have different meanings  depending on context   Short  For foo   r     quot carriage return quot   CR    M   n    matches  quot line feed quot   LF  on Linux Mac  and CRLF on Windows For bar   r    produces LF on Linux Mac  CRLF on Windows  n     quot null byte quot   NUL       When editing files in linux  i e  on a webserver  that were initially created in a windows environment and uploaded  i e  FTP SFTP  - all the  M s you see in vim  are the CR s which linux does not translate as it uses only LF s to depict a line break   Longer  with ASCII numbers    NUL    0x00    0    Ctrl           shown in vim LF    0x0A    10    Ctrl   J CR    0x0D    13    Ctrl   M     M shown in vim Here is a list of the ASCII control characters  Insert them in Vim via Ctrl   V Ctrl   ---key---  In Bash or the other Unix Linux shells  just type Ctrl   ---key---  Try Ctrl   M in Bash  It s the same as hitting Enter  as the shell realizes what is meant  even though Linux systems use line feeds for line delimiting  To insert literal s in bash  prepending them with Ctrl   V will also work  Try in Bash  echo    33 1mcolored    0mnot colored   This uses ANSI escape sequences  Insert the two    s via Ctrl   V  Esc  You might also try Ctrl   V Ctrl   M  Enter  which will give you this  bash     r   command not found  Remember the  r from above    gt  This ASCII control characters list is different from a complete ASCII symbol table  in that the control characters  which are inserted into a console pseudoterminal Vim via the Ctrl key  haha   can be found there  Whereas in C and most other languages  you usually use the octal codes to represent these  characters   If you really want to know where all this comes from  The TTY demystified  This is the best link you will come across about this topic  but beware  There be dragons   TL DR Usually foo    n  and bar    r

User · Answer

With Vim on Windows  use Ctrl   Q in place of Ctrl   V

[vim] How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

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