vim这个字符'^ A'是什么？

Question

I have a cookies file generated by a php script using curl , when I open it with vim I see this strange character '^A' which has a blue color, I know that '^M' means linebreaks, but what is this one? when i try to insert the string that contains this character into a database it looks weird. What does this character stands for, and are cookies files allowed to have special characters in them?

Answer 1

^M isn't a line break, it's Ctrl-M (also known as \\r or Carriage Return, character code 13 / 0x0D).

^A is Ctrl-A (character code 1 / 0x01).

You can see this by moving your cursor over the character and pressing ga .