! character to see the hexadecimal equivalent of the
characters in a line. E.g., if I have a line such as the following that
I know has some nonprinting characters before the single quote and
alphabetic characters for 'current_theme'I may want to
see what nonprinting characters are on the line.
'current_theme' => array(
'label' => $txt['theme_current_settings'],If vi isn't showing me the
line number for lines, I can first have it display the line numbers with
:set number. I can then use
:address_range!xxd to switch to a hex display
of the data on the line. E.g., while attempting to resolve an
issue of extra or omitted non-printing characters in a line while
upgrading
CometChat on a system, I wanted to view the contents of a line
where there was an issue as hexadecimal characters, so I could
see how many tabs and other characters were also present on the
line. After moving to the relevant line, line 222, in vi, I issued
the vi command :222!xxd. I then saw the following, which
revealed there were 4 tab characters, hexadecimal 09,
before 'current_theme on the line. To determine
what the hexadecimal character codes represent, consult an ASCII table.
222 0000000: 0909 0909 2763 7572 7265 6e74 5f74 6865 ....'current_the 223 0000010: 6d65 2720 3d3e 2061 7272 6179 280a me' => array(. 224 'label' => $txt['theme_current_s ettings'],
I could also just use the period character to represent the current line,
so didn't actually have to display the line numbers. E.g., I could have used
:.!xxd to have xxd display the current line in hexadecimal.
0000000: 0909 0909 2763 7572 7265 6e74 5f74 6865 ....'current_the
0000010: 6d65 2720 3d3e 2061 7272 6179 280a me' => array(.
'label' => $txt['theme_current_settings'],I can use :edit! to go back to the plain ASCII display -
edit! will cause the file to be reloaded from disk. You will lose
any modifications you have made, if you haven't saved the file. If you did
save the file, you would be saving the lines as they were displayed on the
screen, i.e., with the characters represented by hexadecimal numbers, which
is likely not what you want.
References: