annoying difference between vim and notepad
drlatex
Hello,
I have a set of files and I applied the command %j! to all of them, to put
all contents into one line for each file.
When I open the resulting files in vim, as expected, the file is 1 line long
(although millions of characters). And the normal mode command G doesn't do
anything because the file is one line long.
However, when I open the exact same file in windows notepad, all the
contents are on one line, EXCEPT that there's a \n at the end of the string
of characters (there's a 2nd line that is empty... and I have to press
"CTRL+end" and "backspace" to remove this last line).
The annoying things is that matlab follows notepad's convention (not that of
vim)....
When I read the number of characters in the string, it INCLUDES the \n
that's present at the end of the notepad files, even though when I open
these files in vim and give the command /\n I get no results.
So I have to open EACH file in notepad and type "CTRL+end" and "backspace"
to remove this surplus \n at the end of each file, but there's no automated
way of doing thing (like in vim I could just use argdo).
So my question is, why does vim not have the \n at the end after pressing
%j! , while matlab and notepad seem to thing there IS a \n at the end ?? And
is there a way to modify the files with vim so that matlab and notepad don't
add this \n to the end ??
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Marc Weber
> So my question is, why does vim not have the \n at the end after pressing
> %j! , while matlab and notepad seem to thing there IS a \n at the end ?? And
> is there a way to modify the files with vim so that matlab and notepad don't
> add this \n to the end ??
:h binary and :h eol
To get no "\n" at the end of file (which is your end of line here)
:setlocal binary | setlocal noeol | w
If you want to do batch processing maybe readfile(..) and writefile(..)
in binary mode could do what you want as well.
So maybe this joins lines removing without adding a trailing "\n" as
well ? (untested)
:call writefile(join(readfile("file",1), "file.out","b"))
Even ifI 've missunderstood your goal this should help you solving your problem.
HTH
Marc W.
Vlad Dogaru
drlatex <n_da...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> So my question is, why does vim not have the \n at the end after
> pressing %j! , while matlab and notepad seem to thing there IS a \n
> at the end ?? And is there a way to modify the files with vim so that
> matlab and notepad don't add this \n to the end ??
Hi,
what I can make from this (might be wrong):
vim automatically adds a newline at the end of any file. In Linux, de
end-of-line is '\n'. In Windows, it's '\r\n', and Notepad sees a
sole '\n' as junk.
You can either set Vim to Windows style EOLs, with :set ff=dos, or ask
vim not to append a newline to the final (and single, in your case)
line, with :set binary.
Hope this helps,
Vlad
pansz
>
> However, when I open the exact same file in windows notepad, all the
> contents are on one line, EXCEPT that there's a \n at the end of the string
> of characters (there's a 2nd line that is empty... and I have to press
> "CTRL+end" and "backspace" to remove this last line).
>
Well, it seems no problem, just different program treat the line
differently.
For notepad and many windows-based programs: \n is not part of a line,
they treat \n as the separator between two lines, so if the last
character of a text file is \n, it will think the last line is an empty
line. (but there will not be an empty line in Vim)
For Vim and most unix-based programs: \n is not a separator, it is part
of a line, all lines must end with \n, so the last character of a text
file will always be \n. (In the whole Linux world, text file without \n
is an invalid or corrupted text file, a C program without an \n ending
may be an error in gcc)
This is the trend, and I think the unix way is actually better. Think if
you need to concatenate two text files? In windows-way you need to
append \n to the first file then do the concatenation, in unix-way you
only need to concatenate two text file.
So, all you can do is: leave the blank line there.
drlatex
Thank you Marc and Vlad for your suggestions and comments.
Also thanks to pansz for commenting, although 'leaving the blank line' is
not an option for me.
I'm glad I was able to learn about how to set files to binary and dos
format, although I was able to resolve the problem by using the unix command
tr -d '\n' <originalfilename.txt >newfilename.txt,
which removes all occurences of \n whether or not it's at the end.
Thank you all once again for your time and help!
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