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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T16:02:50+00:00

I have a file with some accents, and VIM displays them as ~V characters.

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I have a file with some accents, and VIM displays them as “~V” characters. The “od -bc” command tells me the characters are charcode 226. I want to substitute them using VIM. But I can’t get it to match the characters. How can I achieve that?

Optional question: how can I have VIM tell me which charset is used to interpret the current file?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use the following formats, from vim’s manual on patterns and regular expressions:

    ordinary atom
magic   nomagic matches
\%d \%d match specified decimal character (eg \%d123
\%x \%x match specified hex character (eg \%x2a)
\%o \%o match specified octal character (eg \%o040)
\%u \%u match specified multibyte character (eg \%u20ac)
\%U \%U match specified large multibyte character (eg \%U12345678)

    So you should be able to do something like this to replace char 226 with a space globally in the file:

    :%s/\%d226/ /g

    As for the latter, if you do:

    :set encoding

    You’ll see output like:

    encoding=latin1
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