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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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") or v because it would be so easy to type Ctrl + C by mistake and kill the editor.

A: Make it so.