I'm using SunOS 5.9 and the version of vi on this machine has several differences, compared to other machines I use, that don't produce the desired result. For example, if I open a text file in vi and then enter the following in command mode:

%s/ /\r/g

try
%s/ /\\r/g

Have you tried using /usr/xpg4/bin/vi instead?

The action you describe is what I would have expected actually. You need to enter a control character so press CTRL-V which allows entry of a control character, then press enter like this:

:%s/ /<CTRL-V><Enter>/g

Nope - replaces all spaces with \\r

I did try this just now and thankfully I do have access to this editor but I was unable to achieve the desired result. If there's something I would try other than the sed commands I or kalpeer listed I'm not aware of it but I'll research further the differences between your suggestion and the usual vi I use.

This did work for me! How rude of vi! I'll try out other control characters - thank you all for your help.

Nothing rude about it! lol. That's how UNIX is designed to work. You need a way to tell vi to ignore the following key sequence as command, and read it as the character itself instead. The designers chose the CTRL-V sequence to do this, that's all.

Here's a table that shows control characters for various keys like TAB and ESC, etc that may come in handy: ASCII Table - table of ASCII codes.

You can enter control characters in the same way too. See what happens when you type this:

$ echo "Hello<CTRL-V><TAB><CTRL-V><TAB>world"

I have one other problem - the nbsp character (\255)...I realise to enter ctrl character mode I press CTRL + V, but what do I enter to represent the nbsp? I googled and can't find where it relates to the keyboard.

Edit - actually I found out 255 is not nbsp - or at least my editor is returning ctrl + shift + space as \240.

Edit2 - ok now I see that \255 is a type of hyphen...how do I remove them all other than going to the \255 and using the x command to erase it?

[user@hostname]echo -e "\255"
-

:%!tr -d '\255'