Viewing \n and \r characters in Vim?

Question

Is there a way to make \n or \r characters visible in vim? (I want to be able to see if the csv file I am looking at uses just \n or \r and \n at the end of lines.

Hydrotherapeutics

:set invlist seems to do the trick, but is the $ an \n or a \r\n? – Hydrotherapeutics

Vim usually remarks on this when you load the file, doesn't it? (eg, will say [DOS] with the file name if the line endings are \r\n). – Abscond

I opened a file that I wrote in Windows and another that I wrote in Ubuntu with Vim, and used :set invlist on both of them. I expect that the end of line characters are different for both files, but Vim flagged them up as $ in both. So I think you want a different command. Don't know what it is, though! – Lund

Answer 1

:setl fileformat?

dos means CR-LF (consistently; if only some lines contain both, it'll be listed as unix, and you'll see ^M characters at the end of those lines), unix means LF; mac means only CR newlines.

Horribly

hmm when I ran that command it said fileformat=dos so that must mean CR followed by LF (\r\n) ? – Hydrotherapeutics

@leeand00: Correct. If you deal with different fileformats regularly, it may make sense to add %{&l:fileformat} to a custom statusline. – Horribly