[vim] How to convert the ^M linebreak to 'normal' linebreak in a file?

Question

vim shows on every line ending ^M

How I do to replace this with a 'normal' linebreak?

Answer 1

^M is retrieved by ‘Control‘ + ‘v‘ and ‘m‘, so do

s/^M//g

Answer 2

On Linux and Mac OS, the following works

:%s/^V^M/^V^M/g

(where ^V means control-V and ^M means control-M)

Answer 3

Try this:

:%s/<Ctrl-V><Ctrl-M>//g

which means

:%s

substitute

<Ctrl-V><Ctrl-M>

^M characters (the Ctrl-V is a Vim way of writing the Ctrl ^ character)

//

with "" (NULL) characters (the character between the 2 forward-slash / characters)

g

And do it globally (not just the first occurrence on the line).

Answer 4

Look at the file type - DOS or Unix:

:set filetype=unix

The file will be written back without carriage return (CR, ^M) characters.

Answer 5

Alternatively, there are open-source utilities called dos2unix and unix2dos available that do this very thing. On a linux system they are probably installed by default; for a windows system you can download them from http://www.bastet.com/ amongst others.