gVim showing carriage return (^M) even when file mode is explicitly DOS

vim carriage-return line-endings
Jerph picture Jerph · Apr 28, 2009 · Viewed 65.2k times · Source

I'm using gVim on Windows. My code shows ^M characters at the end of lines. I used :set ff=dos to no avail. The ^M characters remain for existing lines, but don't show up for newlines I enter. I've switched modes to mac (shows ^J characters) and unix (also shows ^M characters) and back to dos. Has anyone else seen this?

Answer

richq picture richq · Apr 28, 2009

This happens when you have a mixture of Windows line endings and Unix ones. If you have 100 lines, 99 are \r\n and one is \n, you'll see 99 ^M characters. The fix is to find that one line and replace it. Or run dos2unix on the file. You can replace the Windows line endings with:

:%s/\r\(\n\)/\1/g

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