Unable find the right encoding for a HTML -file in Vim

Question

I see

where all contents is in one line.

It seems that this is the reason of bad encoding. I can see the characters ^M.

How can you get the encoding right in Vim?

Answer 1

Try:

:set fileformats=unix,dos,mac

Then reread your file with :e.

Answer 2

These are "line breaks", or newlines.

From your screenshot it seems the file uses Mac-style line breaks, which are a single carriage return (0x0D, in the screenshot shown as ^M).

Windows (and most of the Internet protocols) use both carriage return and line feed (0x0D 0x0A), and Unix uses a single line feed (0x0A) to separate lines. Macs used to only use carriage returns (now Unix-style is common on MacOS X too).

In vi/vim, try this command to make it recognize the file:

:set ff=mac

You can try using this command to convert the file to Windows-style line breaks:

sed "s/\x0D/\x0D\x0A/g" yourfile.html > yourfile.new.html