Literal character escapes in VimL string

Question

I'm trying to use vimlsp server to help me write VimL, but it is prevented for me due to a parse problem with a literal carriage return (^M) char inside this code:

function! ChompCtrlM(string)
    return substitute(a:string, '^M$', '', '')
endfunction

It turns out I'm not actually even using this, so I'm able to dodge the bullet, but is there a hex escape string literal syntax for VimL? Google yielded nothing.

Answer 1

You can normally use double quoted strings for this purpose. They accept a range of backslash escape sequences to produce special characters without having to input the special character literals into your buffer.

The character that shows as ^M is the carriage return and you can enter it as "\r". You can also use key names in double quoted backspace sequences. The key notation for carriage return is <CR>, so you can produce it in a string with "\<CR>". Both "\r" and "\<CR>" are equivalent and produce the same string.

See :help expr-quote for a full list of backslash escape sequences that are recognized in a double quoted string.

In your specific case, you could rewrite your function as:

function! ChompCtrlM(string)
    return substitute(a:string, "\r$", '', '')
endfunction

This will hopefully avoid the conflict with vimlsp that you found with the special character literal.