How to search for a character the displays as "<85>" in Vim

Thomas G Henry picture Thomas G Henry · Jan 18, 2010 · Viewed 8.1k times · Source

I have a file that was converted from EBCDIC to ASCII. Where there used to be new lines there are now characters that show up as <85> (a symbol representing a single character, not the four characters it appears to be) and the whole file is on one line. I want to search for them and replace them all with new lines again, but I don't know how.

I tried putting the cursor over one and using * to search for the next occurrence, hoping that it might show up in my / search history. That didn't work, it just searched for the word that followed the <85> character.

I searched Google, but didn't see anything obvious.

My goal is to build a search and replace string like:

:%s/<85>/\n/g   

Which currently just gives me:

E486: Pattern not found: <85>  

Answer

Alok Singhal picture Alok Singhal · Jan 18, 2010

I found "Find & Replace non-printable characters in vim" searching Google. It seems like you should be able to do:

:%s/\%x85/\r/gc

Omit the c to do the replacement without prompting, try with c first to make sure it is doing what you want it to do.

In Vim, typing :h \%x gives more details. In addition to \%x, you can use \%d, \%o, \%u and \%U for decimal, octal, up to four and up to eight hexadecimal characters.