How to search and replace an unprintable character

Question

I\'ve a file that was exported from Word and it replaced all quotes with strange unicode characters which aren\'t correctly displayed in vim. So now I want those characters

Answer 1

You can try setting the encoding type and see if it fixes the visalizations of those characters:

:set encoding=utf-8

then you can use them directly. Alternatively, you can place your cursor on the unprintable character and hit ga, it will show the decimal/hex/octal code of that character, then you can substitute it with:

:%s/\%xYY/substitute/g

where YY is the hex code of the char, if it's multibyte:

:%s/\%uYYYY/substitute/g

for details:

:help character-classes

Note that you can search and match with \%xff or \%uabcd but will be unable to substitute with it.