Why are ^M and ^[ being appended to my files?

I noticed that sometimes Vim shows ^M at the end of every line, or ^[ in front of an open开发者_开发问答ing bracket [.

What do these characters mean and how can I get rid of them?

I'm running Vim 7.3 on Debian.

^M is dos-style line endings. You can get rid of them by using the dos2unix program:

dos2unix (yourfile)

These are control characters. The ^M represents the carriage return, used in windows as the other answer already explain.

The ^[ is the escape character. When followed by a opening square bracket ("[") it probably means an ANSI escape sequence. See this article to know more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

And give it a try. For example, in your terminal:

echo ^[[7mHello World!^[[m

Where each ^[ can be inserted with controlVcontrol[. So the sequence of typing is actually:

... controlVcontrol[[7m ...

These are control characters. Here is a link on how to remove them in vi.

This article on Vim wiki should help you: File format.

Though the article title may seem to be different it does talk about line endings and unix/dos/macos file formats.