How to replace a character by a newline in Vim
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.
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 > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> 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.
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 "Quit") orv
because it would be so easy to type Ctrl + C by mistake and kill the editor.A: Make it so.