How do I replace or find non-printable characters in vim regex?

Question

I have a file with some non-printable characters that come up as ^C or ^B, I want to find and replace those characters, how do I go about doing that?

Answer 1

Say you want to replace ^C with C:

:%s/CtrlVC/C/g

Where CtrlVC means type V then C while holding Ctrl pressed.

CtrlV lets you enter control characters.

Answer 2

Removing control symbols only:

:%s/[[:cntrl:]]//g

Removing non-printable characters (note that in versions prior to ~8.1.1 this removes non-ASCII characters also):

:%s/[^[:print:]]//g

The difference between them could be seen if you have some non-printable-non-control characters, e.g. zero-width space:

Answer 3

Try this after saving your file in vim (assuming you are in Linux environment)

:%!tr -cd '[:print:]\n'

Answer 4

None of the answers here using Vim's control characters worked for me. I had to enter a unicode range.

:%s/[\x00-\x08\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F-\x9F]//g

That unicode range was found on this other post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8171868/231914

Answer 5

You can use:

:%s/^C//g

To get the ^C hold the control key, press V then C (Both while holding the control key) and the ^C will appear. This will find all occurrences and replace them with nothing.

To remove both ^C and ^B you can do:

:%s/^C\|^B//g

Answer 6

You can use the CTRL-V prefix to enter them, or if they're not easily typeable, yank and insert them using CTRL-R ".

Answer 7

An option not mentioned in other answers.

Delete a specific unicode character with a long hex code, e.g. <200b>:

:%s/\%U200b//g