can you search "." in vi editor by using ? or / ?
 

can you search the "." (dot) in vim editor by using ? or / ?

If you're looking for a dot "." you'd type /\. or ?\.- the "/" or "?" starts the search command and the "\" escapes the "." so it's treated as a literal dot.

Was that what you meant?

The dot "." is recognised by vim as being a regular expression operator, so it needs to be escaped with a backslash "\" to be read as a literal dot. It's worth finding out about regular expressions, because they're really cool and useful; having said that, it's one of those things I still need to get around to...

searching "." in vi
 

Hi,
for vi U can find a "." by typing /\. in the file.

another useful way to delimit characters
 

Another useful technique of delimiting characters comes when you get a windows file and want to remove all of the ^M (ctrl-M) at the end of a line. You need to enter the ^M literally and not have it get taken as an end-of-line input. You can use the :%s/^v^M//g command. The ctrl-v tells vi to take the next character literally, so you can input it into the command. The s command invokes sed and will change all of the occurrences (the g part) of ^M on all (the % part) of the lines.

vim and Windows
 

Okay. I know this is a Linux forum. But the thread is about vi, which I also use on Windows and which has a peculiar quirk that took me a long time to figure out. With vim on windows, the ^v is used for something else. Instead, ^q is used as the escape character.

- Mark