I pasted text A ∩ B
into Vim in order to figure out how the "cap" character is represented.
Using its code, I would then figure out the right commands to print it out from a data analysis environment (specifically, Matlab, though that's not relevant to the question at this point).
The Bash command file ~/tmp/tmp.txt
(where the text was pasted) shows that the encoding is UTF-8. So I did some web searching about UTF-8, Unicode, and ASCII.
In Vim, :help :ga
says that it prints out the ASCII code. For the "cap" character, it prints <∩> 8745, Hex 2229, Oct 21051, Digr (U
. The Hex code is two bytes. From web searching, I'm finding that UTF-8 uses a variable number of bytes, with the first 127 ASCII characters taking up one byte. Since the most significant of 8 bits is for 128+, I assume that 128+ ASCII values take more than one byte because the most significant bit is used as a flag that one more byte is needed for the UTF-8 encoding.
The help for :ga
says nothing about Unicode or UTF-8. It says that when a character is larger than 127, the <M-x>
form is also printed. Pressing Ctrl+]
on <M-x>
doesn't warp me to an explanation of what it is. I can't seem to find anything on the internet.
Can someone please point me to an explanation?
P.S. I am not exploring :g8
, but I am curious about <M-x>
.