Re: How to handle non-ascii characters?

On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 08:43:23AM -0700, Barry Gold wrote:
> Background: I write  documents in MS Word, but my target format is HTML. After
> I do a Save as "Web Page (filtered)", I can use global replaces to get rid of
> most of the cruft that Word generates, but I have a problem with non-ASCII
> characters: cent sign, circle-r, dash, nbsp, etc.
>
> None of these looks like themselves when I edit the file with vim in a cygwin
> Terminal window. I can search for [^ -~^t] to find the non-ASCII characters,
> then go to the original word document to find out what the correct character
> is. If I had only a few of these, that would be enough. But in a longer
> document, a given non-ASCII can occur hundreds of times. So once I've found
> (e.g.) an emdash, I want to replace _all_ occurrences with  "—". But I
> have no way of representing the character I want to replace on the command
> line.
>
> I usually bring up the HTML file in Emacs so I can tell it to do a replace all
> on the character. I know emacs sort-of, but every time I want to do anything
> more than basic editing I have to look up the commands I want with ^hapropos.
> Is there a way to do this in vim without getting into emacs.
>
> Note: ^t is what a tab character looks like on the vim command line.

I sometimes deal with something a bit similar. For
example if I want to change all the fancy "right single
quote" marks from a Windows file into a plain apostrophe,
"'" I use 'ga' on the first found character (the fancy
quote) to see that the code is U+2019. Then I search for
that, using \%u2019.
Would that help?

John Cordes



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