Menu
I keep getting ^M character in my vimrc and it breaks my configuration.
443
Show activity on this post. The character that vim displays as ^M is CR (carriage return, ASCII character 13). Windows uses both CR and LF (new line, ASCII character 10) to encode line breaks in text files. Linux/Unix use only LF to encode line breaks, and Mac OS uses only CR .
Viewing the certificate files in Linux shows ^M characters appended to every line. The file in question was created in Windows and then copied over to Linux. ^M is the keyboard equivalent to \r or CTRL-v + CTRL-m in vim.
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.
Control M ( ^M) characters are introduced when you use lines of text from a windows computer to Linux or Unix machine. Most common reasons are when you directly copy a file from a windows system or submit form data copied and pasted from a windows machine.
Unix uses 0xA for a newline character. Windows uses a combination of two characters: 0xD 0xA. 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. This is sometimes abbreviated as ^V^M, but note that you must enter it as described in the previous sentence, rather than typing it out literally.
This expression will replace all occurrences of ^M with the empty string (i.e. nothing). I use this to get rid of ^M in files copied from Windows to Unix (Solaris, Linux, OSX).
116
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
