Question

When I save lines of data in excel files as tab delimited .txt files, and then open those files in VIM, I see that what was once a multi-line file in excel is now a single line file in VIM.

The “lines” can be separated in VIM using some substitution commands:

%s/^M/\r\n/g

After this, the “lines” are now separated by an ^@.
I deal with it using another substitution command:

%s/^@//g

My questions are:

1. Why do my multi-line txt excel files open as a single line in VI?
2. What is ^@?
3. Is there a better way to ‘fix’ my txt files?

Answer 1

Try this command:

    :%s/^M/\r/g

\r is the carriage return character vim uses. The ^M character is a newline character that is literally displayed.