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 also filter it by using the tr command

for example replacing the hex a0 which stems from MacOs cut-and-paste can be replaced with a whitespace as follows (\240 being the octal representation of hex a0)

:.,$!tr "\240" " "