Hi All,
I've a CSV file in Windows which contains Registered trademark symbol. When I upload this file to Linux & try to see the contents from Vi editor, it shows some weird characted in place of the registered symbol character. However, when I do the cat command, it shows properly.

Can anyone tell me how to resolve this issue? I tried all the coomands (dos2unix, etc) of removing control-m characters but none of them worked.

Please help

Thanks!

You must have an application that can handle extended character sets, such UTF-8 and UTF-16, or rather, the specific char set the file is made in. As most terminal/character based applications are set for ASCII they handle extended characters very differently. It may display as lines of text with for example cat or less, but bash can't read script files with dos line breaks. Your term/x-term may be able to display UTF-8 characters but vi/vim can't. I'm sure there's a version of it that can. I think a few graphical text editors can recognise and handle those special (usually two-byte) characters.

Since You mentioned CSV, if the contents of the file is to be processed in a script, (for example to be re-used on a Windows machine or as Web-result), my experience is that the "funny" characters are kept intact. So if that is Your goal, don't worry to much about how it looks in vi, if the final target is something that can read extended character sets.

/Lakris

Hi Lakris,
Thanks for your reply! My purpsose is to modify the file from linux. One of the automated program puts the file from windows to Linux. LAter we manually go to Linux box & change it if we want to.

Can you please suggest how can I change special characters??? Do I need to install anything?

Thanks!