bgold12 wrote: > I was confused as to why my command :%s/\n\n/\n/ was not > getting rid of all blank lines (instead it got rid of all > double newlines and replaced them with a single ^@ (null) > character; very strange), and then i found > http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip26. According to this > site: > >> To replace every CR with LF (when searching, \r matches CR, >> but when replacing, \r inserts LF): >>:%s/\r/\r/g > > This cleared up the issue. But I can't understand why \r > should mean one thing when searching, but something else when > replacing. Is this a bug, or is there a reason for this that > makes it worth complicating search/replace commands with > inconsistent character meanings?
The text you quote from tip 26 is correct, and it's not a bug. There's a tiny bit more at :help /\r :help NL-used-for-Nul http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search_and_replace I think the reason relates to the confusion surrounding how different operating systems have represented end-of-line over the years. Vim attempts to handle different systems as transparently as it can, with the weirdness shown above. In the C language (and others), \r is CR (carriage return = ctrl-m) and \n is LF (line feed = ctrl-j). We press Enter (CR) to insert a newline, but Unix uses an LF to indicate end-of-line (newline), so %s/\r/\r/g makes sense... John --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
