Why is \r a newline for Vim?

Question

From question How to replace a character for a newline in Vim?. You have to use \r when replacing text for a newline, like this

:%s/%/\r/g

But when replacing end of lines and newlines for a character, you can do it like:

:%s/\n/%/g 

What section of the manual documents these behaviors, and what's the reasoning behind them?

Answer 1

From vim docs on patterns:

\r matches <CR>

\n matches an end-of-line - When matching in a string instead of buffer text a literal newline character is matched.

Answer 2

From http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Search_and_replace :

When Searching

...

\n is newline, \r is CR (carriage return = Ctrl-M = ^M)

When Replacing

...

\r is newline, \n is a null byte (0x00).

Answer 3

Another aspect to this is that \0, which is traditionally NULL, is taken in s//\0/ to mean "the whole matched pattern". (Which, by the way, is redundant with, and longer than, &).

• So you can't use \0 to mean NULL, so you use \n
• So you can't use \n to mean \n, so you use \r.
• So you can't use \r to mean \r, but I don't know who would want to add that char on purpose.

—☈

Answer 4

:help NL-used-for-Nul

Technical detail:

<Nul> characters in the file are stored as <NL> in memory. In the display they are shown as "^@". The translation is done when reading and writing files. To match a <Nul> with a search pattern you can just enter CTRL-@ or "CTRL-V 000". This is probably just what you expect. Internally the character is replaced with a <NL> in the search pattern. What is unusual is that typing CTRL-V CTRL-J also inserts a <NL>, thus also searches for a <Nul> in the file. {Vi cannot handle <Nul> characters in the file at all}

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Answer 5

First of all, open :h :s to see the section "4.2 Substitute" of documentation on "Change". Here's what the command accepts:

:[range]s[ubstitute]/{pattern}/{string}/[flags] [count]

Notice the description about pattern and string

For the {pattern} see |pattern|.
{string} can be a literal string, or something
special; see |sub-replace-special|.

So now you know that the search pattern and replacement patterns follow different rules. If you follow the link to |pattern|, it takes you to the section that explains the whole regexp patterns used in Vim.

Meanwhile, |sub-replace-special| takes you to the subsection of "4.2 Substitute", which contains the patterns for substitution, among which is \r for line break/split.

(The shortcut to this part of manual is :h :s%)