How to get buffer contents including line endings?

Question

I want to get the whole buffer contents as a single string. Currently I'm doing this:

let line_ending = "\n"
let text = join(getline(1, '$'), line_ending).line_ending

But this assumes the line ending. If this is the best approach, how can I find out what the line ending actually is?

Or is there a better way to get the actual buffer contents?

Answer 1

It's possible to directly put the content of the current buffer into a register (and from here into a variable) thanks to :%y (:yank takes an optional register name).

However, after a test on a file in dos format, I've seen that my register contained characters of code 10 for newlines. The test being done with :echo map(split(@", '\zs'), 'char2nr(v:val)').

I'm not sure why you want to extract the binary content of the buffer though -- IOW, I'm not sure to see why you want to keep the original line ending.

Answer 2

The 'fileformat' setting control the end-of-line character that Vim uses. There are three possible values:

• unix – \n
• dos – \r\n
• mac – \r (this is very archaic and only applies to the pre-OSX "classic" MacOS of the 80s and 90s).

In VimScript this would be:

if &fileformat == 'unix'
    let line_ending = "\n"
elseif &fileformat == 'dos'
    let line_ending = "\r\n"
elseif &fileformat == 'mac'
    let line_ending = "\r"
else
    echoerr "unknown value for the 'fileformat' setting: " . &fileformat
endif

Or a shorter version:

let line_ending = {"unix": "\n", "dos": "\r\n", "mac": "\r"}[&fileformat]