VI Editor problems

Clarifications

"[i]1. How to remove colors and highlightings from a vi editor text file.[/i]"

From within a vi (or Vim) session, you can (in command mode) enter this command:

[b]:syntax off[/b]

In a configuration file for vi (or Vim), such as [b].vimrc[/b] in the user's directory on a Unix (or Linux) system, you could include this line to have syntax highlighting turned off by default:

[b]syntax off[/b]

"[i]2. I am having ^M character at end of each line in vi editor how to remove it.[/i]"

In command mode, just enter this command:

[b]:%s/\r//g[/b]

The ^M you're seeing is not a normal carat symbol "^" followed by a normal "M" symbol. Instead, it's the visual representation of the "+" character sequence (holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the M key). The reason this is showing up is related to a mismatch between how Unix and DOS deal with linebreaks in text files.

With the command [b]:%s/\r//g[/b], you're using a regular expression to replace all instances of the carriage return character (the "^M" you see, represented by the \r escape character squence) with nothing. The "%" symbol says, basically, "operate on every line in the file". The "s" before the first slash stands for "substitution": "s///" is the format of a substitution regular expression. Substitution regular expressions search for an instance of whatever appears between the first and second slashes, and replaces it with whatever appears between the second and third slashes. The "g" at the end tells it to search "globally" within each line on which it operates.

In other words, "%s/\r//g" means:

1. For every line,
2. substitute
3. carriage return
4. with an empty string
5. globally.

Hope that helps.

edit: typo

The tag or word which we searched last time is filled with a background colour (highlighted) in whole vi file.

Upvote my response(s), then. People like getting feedback when they provide help.

edit: Thanks.