Match and replace line breaks in vim

Published on February 20, 2022

There are 2 different special characters when dealing with line breaks:

• \n represents the new line character byte 0x0a
• \r represents the carriage return byte 0x0d

But in vim at the replacement side of the pattern things change a bit:

• \n becomes the null character 0x00
• \r becomes the new line character 0x0a

So at the search side you should use \n while at replace \r.

Example:

%s/\n/\r/g

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