I have a file that was converted from EBCDIC to ASCII. Where there used to be new lines there are now characters that show up as <85> (a symbol representing a single character, not the four characters it appears to be) and the whole file is on one line. I want to search for them and replace them all with new lines again, but I don't know how.
I tried putting the cursor over one and using * to search for the next occurrence, hoping that it might show up in my / search history. That didn't work, it just searched for the word that followed the <85> character.
I searched Google, but didn't see anything obvious.
My goal is to build a search and replace string like:
:%s/<85>/\n/g
Which currently just gives me:
E486: Pattern not found: <85>
I found "Find & Replace non-printable characters in vim" searching Google. It seems like you should be able to do:
:%s/\%x85/\r/gc
Omit the c to do the replacement without prompting, try with c first to make sure it is doing what you want it to do.
In Vim, typing :h \%x gives more details. In addition to \%x, you can use \%d, \%o, \%u and \%U for decimal, octal, up to four and up to eight hexadecimal characters.