On Sat, 22 Feb 2025, Dave Tyson wrote:
I have a file which has some hex characters 0x80 and higher.
I am trying to search for them so I can replace them. I can see them
and they appear, for example, like \x93 on the screen and occupy a
single character.
nvi(1) has a poorly-documented Ctrl-X key which can be used to both enter and
search for (after a fashion) arbitrary chars. To input, let's say, \x93, do:
$ LC_CTYPE=C vi foo.txt # must use "C" locale
i # insert mode
<Ctrl-X>93<ESC> # input single: \x93
<Ctrl-X>94<Ctrl-X>A1<ESC> # input 2 chars: \x94\xA1
...
For searching:
$ LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 vi foo.txt # must use UTF-8 locale for some
reason...
/<Ctrl-X>93<ENTER> # search for: \x93
A (comparatively) less bug-ridden technique is to search using negated
char.-classes:
[^[:print:][:cntrl:]] # non-ASCII chars.
That works, except that \x00 is _not_ regarded as a control-char.
-RVP
