How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Here's the trick:

First, set your Vi(m) session to allow pattern matching with special characters (i.e.: newline). It's probably worth putting this line in your .vimrc or .exrc file:

:set magic

Next, do:

:s/,/,^M/g

To get the ^M character, type Ctrl + V and hit Enter. Under Windows, do Ctrl + Q, Enter. The only way I can remember these is by remembering how little sense they make:

A: What would be the worst control-character to use to represent a newline?

B: Either q (because it usually means "Quit") or v because it would be so easy to type Ctrl + C by mistake and kill the editor.

A: Make it so.

Use \r instead of \n.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.