Access of special characters

[Robert N. Eaton]

Thanks, Kevin

Exactly what I wanted to know!.  See how easy life can be?

Bob Eaton

Kevin Buettner wrote:
> 
> On Feb 27,  9:37am, Robert N. Eaton wrote:
> 
> > Thanks, Shawn, I thought it was just me. I tried the alt+ method both at
> > the bash prompt and in vi.
> 
> I haven't been following this thread closely, but vile and xvile (which
> are vi-like editors) allow you to enter arbitrary 8-bit characters.  Below
> is the relevant information from vile's help document.  Both vile and
> xvile are available on Red Hat's Power Tools CD.  (But if you want
> Perl support, you have to build it yourself.)  For more information
> regarding this editor, see http://vile.cx.
> 
> 8-Bit Operation
> ---------------
>         vile allows input, manipulation, and display of all 256 possible
>         byte-wide characters.  (Double-wide characters are not supported.)
> 
>         Output
>         ------
>         By default, characters with the high bit set (decimal value 128 or
>         greater) will display as hex (or octal; see "non-printing- octal"
>         above) sequences, e.g.  \xA5.  A range of characters which should
>         display as themselves (that is, characters understood by the user's
>         display terminal) may be given using the "printing-low" and
>         "printing-high" settings (see above).  Useful values for these
>         settings are 160 and 255, which correspond to the printable range
>         of the ISO-Latin-1 character set.
> 
>         Input
>         -----
> 
>         There are basically three ways of getting 8-bit characters into
>         a vile buffer:
> 
>         Directly -- if the user's input device (i.e. the terminal or
>             xterm) can generate all characters, and if the terminal
>             settings are such that these characters pass through
>             unmolested, then vile will happily incorporate them into the
>             user's text, or act on them if they are bound to functions.  On
>             an xterm, try "stty cs8 -parenb -istrip".  Real serial lines
>             may take more convincing, at both ends, but use that stty
>             command as a starting point.
> 
>         As numbers -- the ^V prefix (or, more correctly, the key bound to
>             the "quote-next-character" function), if followed by up to
>             three digits, will insert a character whose value is that
>             number (no greater than 255) into the buffer.  The number may
>             be entered in decimal (^VNNN), octal with a leading '0' (^V0NNN),
>             or hex with a leading 'x' (^VxNN).
> 
>         As digraphs -- Perhaps more useful to some people is using a set of
>             ":map!" commands to aid insertion of 8-bit text.  The file
>             "digraphs.rc" distributed with the vile source contains a set
>             of mappings which should aid the input of ISO 8859/1 text.  As
>             examples, the mappings in digraphs.rc allow one to type ^KU" or
>             ^Ku" to get an umlaut character, ^K12 to get the little '1/2'
>             symbol, ^KY- to get the Yen currency symbol, or ^K:- to get an
>             arithmetic division symbol.
> 
>         Users who have no need to enter 8-bit text may want access to the
>         meta-bound functions while in insert mode as well as command mode.
>         The mode "meta-insert-bindings" controls whether functions bound to
>         meta- keys (characters with the high bit set) are executed only in
>         command mode, or in both command and insert modes.  In either case,
>         if a character is _not_ bound to a function, then it will be
>         self-inserting when in insert mode.  (To bind to a meta key in the
>         .vilerc file, one may specify it as itself, or in hex or octal, or
>         with the shorthand 'M-c' where c is the corresponding character
>         without the high bit set.
> 
>         (Although it is possible to edit and view all 256 characters, it is
>         currently impossible to _search_ for a string that contains the NULL
>         character, since this is used internally to terminate the search
>         string.)
> 
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