Hi, James Vega wrote: > > On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 11:50:51AM +0200, Jürgen Krämer wrote: >> >> with 'encoding' set to "utf-8" there is a quite confusing (to me) >> difference between the column number and my expectations (supported by >> the virtual column number) if there are non-ASCII characters on the >> line. > > Column number n is really the nth byte on that line. This is described > at ":help /\%c". This description should explain all the behavior > you're seeing. This is the intended behavior and I'm not sure of a way > off-hand to get the visual character count like you want.
yes, it does *explain* the behaviour. But it makes things even worse. Suppose I have some lines with aligned data (just like a table) where I want to replace certain columns with dashes, e.g., Peter Traurig irgendwo 0 Hänschen Klein unterwegs 1 Jürgen Krämer hier 2 :%s/\%18c.*\%27c/---------/ should strike out the third column of the table, but the result is Peter Traurig --------- 0 Hänschen Klein ---------s 1 Jürgen Krämer--------- 2 which is depending on the random number of non-ASCII characters in front of the used position, characters whose internal representations should never be relevant for this substitution, because the user cannot know them. Since it works as documented it is hard to call it a bug, but I would really consider it a mis-feature, because it works in such a non-predictable way. To work around the problem in this example is not that hard -- I can use /\%...v instead. The example in my original mail poses a bigger problem (to me) -- I'd like to switch to "encoding=utf-8" as default, but I often need to work with text files of fixed line length. With encoding set to "latin1" the difference between column number and virtual column number in the status line is a visual clue that there is a tabular or a control code in the line, reminding me to look for this character. With UTF-8 encoding this hint would be rendered useless because of all those little umlauts in German. :-( But perhaps this is just my special problem. Regards, Jürgen -- Jürgen Krämer Softwareentwicklung HABEL GmbH & Co. KG mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Hinteres Öschle 2 Tel: +49 / 74 61 / 93 53 - 15 78604 Rietheim-Weilheim Fax: +49 / 74 61 / 93 53 - 99
