[ale] vim set list not showing special characters seen with cat -vt

[Lightner, Jeffrey]

"vim -b" isn't doing anything differently for this file than vim by itself.

The question isn't what other tools can show the characters or even exactly what they are - the question is how to make vim show they are there.   In this case the user couldn't process the file and it was because of these hidden characters.

My findings on translation set at least explain why his co-worker saw something there when he didn't.    

It just seems odd to me one can see it with "cat -vt" but something as powerful as vim doesn't have a simple way to show this.

By the way, to rule out PuTTY I did this in text console window and in a GUI terminal session launched from gnome.   Neither of them displayed the character as there in vim.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Horkan Smith
Sent: Friday, June 02, 2017 4:48 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] vim set list not showing special characters seen with cat -vt

Silly question, what happens when you try 'vim -b filename' ?

And, could you try 'hd filename' or 'od -t x1 -t a filename' to see which bytes are actually there?

:set list is better for 'whitespace' characters - see :help listchars for some setings, but I didn't notice any that looked likely for unicode.

later!
   horkan

On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 07:01:52PM +0000, Lightner, Jeffrey wrote:
> The internet has a thousand posts saying ":set list" will show hidden characters.
> 
> However that is NOT showing characters I know to be in the file:
> 
> If I do a "cat" with no flags on a file it contains a line (obfuscated to protect the guilty) like this:
> ORDER_HEADER|OBFUSCATE|###########|##########|USD|OBFUSCATE|AA||OBFUSC
> ATE|#### OBFUSCATE PARKWAY|OFUSCATE ###  SUITE 
> ###||ATLANTA|GA|#####|###|######|USER at ADDRESS.COM|FIRST LAST |### 
> OBFUSCATE PLACE 
> ||CITY||ST|US||#####|##########|USER at ANOTHERADDRESS.COM
> 
> The key field being:
> |### OBFUSCATE PLACE |
> 
> If I run "cat -vt" on the file to show special characters and tabs I can see that field actually has extra hidden characters in it:
> |### OBFUSCATE PLACEM-BM- |
> 
> If I do vim of the file the field appears as it did in cat without the "-vt" flags.
> 
> If I do ":set list" it shows me other characters (e.g. $ for each end of line) but does NOT show the extra characters seen for the above field that I see with "cat -vt").
> 
> How do I get vim to show the same  characters in the field that I see with "cat -vt"?
> 
> When I ran "file" on this file it says it is "UTF-8 Unicode text" whereas usually files of this type (without the special characters) simply show they are "ASCII text".   Presumably it is the special characters in this one that make it appear as UTF-8.   Doing :set options to change encoding to utf8 does NOT show the characters either.
> 
> 
> 
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--
Horkan Smith
678-777-3263 cell, ale at horkan.net
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