Replacing carriage return ^M with Enter

Question

I know how to remove ^M in my files (%s/^M//g), but this one is just one line I'd like to replace ^M with enter... what's the enter character in VIM (to use in commnad-line mode).

Answer 1

To replace carriage return character (which is <C-m>) with line feed character (which is unix line break character) you should run a bit strange command:

%s/\r/\r/g 

It looks like if it is doing nothing, but in regular expressions and double-quoted strings carriage returns are represented using \r and line feeds with \n, while in the replacement part of :s command and substitute() function they mean the opposite.

Note that in terminal Enter produces <C-m>, so your initial request is not valid.

Answer 2

:%s/\r//g only works when:

• set ff=unix, which when done, automatically converts all CRLF to LF

• set ff=dos and CR is a rogue char that is not preceded by LF, e.g., inserted with C-V C-M.

  CR in LF CR pairs will not be found.

Therefore, if all you want is to convert every LF CR to LF, you should use:

:set ff=unix :w