Saturday, October 21, 2017

Re: How to handle non-ascii characters?

On 10/21/2017 9:39 AM, johncordes@gmail.com wrote:
> 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?
>

AHA!  Yes, that works.  This will do fine. Thank you.

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