Find character under cursor in vim

vim

In vim, how can I find the next occurrence of the character under the cursor? I want something like * but for a single character instead of a word.

Example:

H|o|w are you?

goes to:

How are y|o|u?

The reason I want it is because there is a strange looking character (one that I don't even know how to type) all over my file and I want to remove them all quickly.

Best Answer

Also look at

ga (show character under cursor as ascii)

g8 (show character under cursor as utf8, including Unicode stuff, hex codes etc)

And most usefully:

8g8

Find an illegal UTF-8 byte sequence at or after the
        cursor.  This works in two situations:
        1. when 'encoding' is any 8-bit encoding
        2. when 'encoding' is "utf-8" and 'fileencoding' is
           any 8-bit encoding
        Thus it can be used when editing a file that was
        supposed to be UTF-8 but was read as if it is an 8-bit
        encoding because it contains illegal bytes.
        Does not wrap around the end of the file.
        Note that when the cursor is on an illegal byte or the
        cursor is halfway a multi-byte character the command
        won't move the cursor.

Update

Use Tim Pope's vim-characterize plugin to get full UNICODE names and data:

In Vim, pressing ga on a character reveals its representation in decimal, octal, and hex.

Characterize.vim modernizes this with the following additions:

Unicode character names: U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SYMBOL

Vim digraphs (type after to insert the character): Co , cO

Emoji codes: :copyright:

HTML entities: ©

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to effectively work with multiple files in Vim

How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Related Topic

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.