> Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 07:56:08 -0700
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> CC: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Substitution of metacharacters
>
> On Thursday, May 24, 2012 8:34:03 AM UTC-5, Bob von Knobloch wrote:
> > Hi, I've searched all over but can't find an answer. How can one perform
> > commands like ':%s/\n/\r\r/g' (replacing newlines or tabs etc.) in the
> > gui's 'find and replace' dialogue?
> >
>
> I tried replacing tabs, and also replacing newlines, with the GUI dialog
> (Edit->Find an Replace...)
>
> Entering \t as the "Find what" pattern and " " (two spaces) as the "Replace
> with" text worked as expected, replacing all tab characters with spaces.
>
> Entering \n as the "Find what" and '.' as the "Replace with" text also worked
> as expected, joining all lines together with a '.' character in between.
>
> Oh, I see...if a special character is in the "Replace with" text, it doesn't
> work as you are hoping. For example, with "Find what" as \\t and "Replace
> with" as \t, the dialog does nothing. The "Replace with" text seems to always
> be taken literally. The help does not really offer any information about the
> behavior of the find-replace dialog (:help :promptrepl). It looks like to
> replace with a special character, you somehow need to enter that special
> character in the dialog.
>
> For some characters, you can do this by copy-pasting the desired literal
> character into the "Replace with" text. You can get it into the clipboard
> from within Vim with, for example,
>
> :let @+="\t"
>
> Unfortunately, this does not work for linefeed characters, and probably other
> special unprintable characters will likewise not be available.
>
> I'm not sure if there's a way to enter these characters directly in the
> dialog, but likely you'll need to use the command-line rather than the dialog
> for special patterns like this.
>
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try this:
Find what: \n
Replace with: \="\x20"
to replace all newlines with a space
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