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7

I have a file with some non-printable characters that come up as ^C or ^B, I want to find and replace those characters, how do I go about doing that?

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up vote 20 down vote accepted

Say you want to replace ^C with C:

:%s/CtrlVC/C/g

Where CtrlVC means type V then C while holding Ctrl pressed.

CtrlV lets you enter control characters.

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1  
You can also use Ctrl-Q. This is useful for some users who map Ctrl-V to clipboard operations – Iain Ballard Feb 19 '15 at 15:52
up vote 44 down vote

Removing control symbols only:

:%s/[[:cntrl:]]//g

Removing non-printable characters (removes non-ASCII characters also):

:%s/[^[:print:]]//g
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At least until vim 7.3 [:print:] only matches ASCII printable characters (edited the answer to alert readers about this fact) – ndemou Feb 10 '15 at 22:00
    
@ndemou This is tricky, with the [ ] around the [:print:] the ^ should invert the match and return any non-printable. Or perhaps that was your edit? – dragon788 Mar 2 '16 at 0:43
    
@dragon788, yes I was aware of how it works when I wrote my comment. Try the 2nd regex on text with printable Unicode characters outside the ASCII table to understand my comment (it will remove the Unicode characters). – ndemou Mar 2 '16 at 12:16
up vote 6 down vote

Try this after saving your file in vim (assuming you are in Linux environment)

:%!tr -cd '[:print:]\n'
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5  
please explain this day saving magic voodoo! – Prospero Nov 26 '12 at 20:13
3  
@JamesAndino: :% filters all lines using the external (!) programm tr, which removes (-d) all characters that are not (-c) printable ([:print:]) or newline (\n). – quasimodo Feb 7 '14 at 18:08
2  
This isn't Unicode friendly, as it is a POSIX character class (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Character_classes)‌​. So if you have YAML with data like 你好, tr will strip the Unicode data when using [:print:]. – ash Feb 10 '14 at 1:40
up vote 5 down vote

You can use the CTRL-V prefix to enter them, or if they're not easily typeable, yank and insert them using CTRL-R ".

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up vote 4 down vote

You can use:

:%s/^C//g

To get the ^C hold the control key, press V then C (Both while holding the control key) and the ^C will appear. This will find all occurrences and replace them with nothing.

To remove both ^C and ^B you can do:

:%s/^C\|^B//g
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up vote 3 down vote

None of the answers here using Vim's control characters worked for me. I had to enter a unicode range. 

:%s/[\x00-\x08\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F-\x9F]//g

That unicode range was found on this other post: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8171868/231914

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Because TAB is considered not-printable, So these [[:cntrl:]] and [^[:print:]] match TAB (0x9, C-I) – mosh Jan 15 at 3:09

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