How to search and replace an unprintable character

Question

I've a file that was exported from Word and it replaced all quotes with strange unicode characters which aren't correctly displayed in vim. So now I want those characters to be replaced with quotes, but I don't know how to enter this character in

:%s/???/'/g 

The characters look like this: ~U ~R. But of course I can't just mark them with mouse and paste in the command.

Answer 1

You can try setting the encoding type and see if it fixes the visalizations of those characters:

:set encoding=utf-8 

then you can use them directly. Alternatively, you can place your cursor on the unprintable character and hit ga, it will show the decimal/hex/octal code of that character, then you can substitute it with:

:%s/\%xYY/substitute/g 

where YY is the hex code of the char, if it's multibyte:

:%s/\%uYYYY/substitute/g 

for details:

:help character-classes 

Note that you can search and match with \%xff or \%uabcd but will be unable to substitute with it.

Answer 2

I usually:

1. delete the character with: x
2. undo my change with: u
3. do the substitute thanks to c_CTRL-R: :%s/^R"/'/g