Menu
How can I remove ^M characters from text files? A. ^M are nothing more than carriage return, so it is easy to use the search and replace function of vim to remove them. That will do the job.
0xD is the carriage return character. ^M happens to be the way vim displays 0xD (0x0D = 13, M is the 13th letter in the English alphabet). You can remove all the ^M characters by running the following: :%s/^M//g. Where ^M is entered by holding down Ctrl and typing v followed by m , and then releasing Ctrl .
Show activity on this post. ^M is a carriage return, and is commonly seen when files are copied from Windows.
As a command, type
:%s/^M$//
(To get ^M, press ^V ^M, where ^ is CTRL on most keyboards)
One easy way to strip out the DOS line endings is to use the ff option:
:set ff=unix
:wq
Now your file is back to the good-old-Unix-way.
If you want to add the DOS line-endings (to keep a printer happy, or transfer files with Windows friends who don't have nice tools) you can go the opposite direction easily:
:set ff=dos
:wq
You can do this:
:set fileformats=dos
It will hide the ^M's, without touching the file.
There's a program called dos2unix that should strip those for you. Windows uses different line-ending characters which is why that happens.
This worked for me in a file that had everything on one line:
First find all matches
:%s/^M//
(To get ^M, press ^V ^M, where ^ is Ctrl on most keyboards)
Then replace with newlines
:%s//\r/g
Combined command would be:
:%s/^M/\r/g
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With