I thought my original message was clear.

This is one long file in a single line. Wherever XXX appears I need a carriage return or newline so the file can be read and edited with vi.

So I'm not just trying to get rid of XXX, I'm trying to REPLACE them with a carriage return.

I originally screwed up this file after it had been saved in MS Word and of course there was a ^M everywhere.

I used the substitute command in vi to get rid of those ^Ms but still didn't achieve the result I wanted. Then I substituted XXX for ^M with:

:%s/^M/XXX/g