[ale] vim set list not showing special characters seen with cat -vt

[Horkan Smith]

Silly question, what happens when you try 'vim -b filename' ?

And, could you try 'hd filename' or 'od -t x1 -t a filename' to see which bytes are actually there?

:set list is better for 'whitespace' characters - see :help listchars for some setings, but I didn't notice any that looked likely for unicode.

later!
   horkan

On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 07:01:52PM +0000, Lightner, Jeffrey wrote:
> The internet has a thousand posts saying ":set list" will show hidden characters.
> 
> However that is NOT showing characters I know to be in the file:
> 
> If I do a "cat" with no flags on a file it contains a line (obfuscated to protect the guilty) like this:
> ORDER_HEADER|OBFUSCATE|###########|##########|USD|OBFUSCATE|AA||OBFUSCATE|#### OBFUSCATE PARKWAY|OFUSCATE ###  SUITE ###||ATLANTA|GA|#####|###|######|USER at ADDRESS.COM|FIRST LAST |### OBFUSCATE PLACE ||CITY||ST|US||#####|##########|USER at ANOTHERADDRESS.COM
> 
> The key field being:
> |### OBFUSCATE PLACE |
> 
> If I run "cat -vt" on the file to show special characters and tabs I can see that field actually has extra hidden characters in it:
> |### OBFUSCATE PLACEM-BM- |
> 
> If I do vim of the file the field appears as it did in cat without the "-vt" flags.
> 
> If I do ":set list" it shows me other characters (e.g. $ for each end of line) but does NOT show the extra characters seen for the above field that I see with "cat -vt").
> 
> How do I get vim to show the same  characters in the field that I see with "cat -vt"?
> 
> When I ran "file" on this file it says it is "UTF-8 Unicode text" whereas usually files of this type (without the special characters) simply show they are "ASCII text".   Presumably it is the special characters in this one that make it appear as UTF-8.   Doing :set options to change encoding to utf8 does NOT show the characters either.
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Horkan Smith
678-777-3263 cell, ale at horkan.net