CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsvimnotepad
Kit Ho
Kit Ho

Reputation: 26958

How to get Vim to correctly display file instead of showing ^@ characters

I have a file which shows different things in Notepad and Vim.

The file displays normally under Windows Notepad:

picture of file in Windows Notepad

Strange character are added to each character when using Vim.

picture of file in Vim

Anyone know how to dismiss those strange character in Vim under Windows environment?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1637

Answers (3)

kev
kev

Reputation: 161604

As you can see: TSS is displayed as T^@S^@S^@(binary: 54 00 53 00 53 00).
Because vim shows \0x00 as ^@. It sounds like UTF16LE.

You can convert UTF16LE to UTF8:

:e ++enc=UTF16LE
:set fenc=UTF8
:w

Upvotes: 6

Guffa
Guffa

Reputation: 700152

The file is stored as UTF-16, where each character is represented by two bytes. VIM opens it as if it was an ASCII or UTF-8 file, so each pair of bytes is turned into two characters.

Notepad recognises the encoding, but apparently VIM doesn't. Specify the encoding when you open the file.

Upvotes: 1

hopia
hopia

Reputation: 4996

That looks like unicode. You can open the file in notepad and save it as ascii.

Alternatively, if you don't want to create a new file, you can change your vimrc settings to enable multi-byte character encoding.

Here's more information from the vim wiki:
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Working_with_Unicode

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions