Vim statusline: show the character itself

Question

Is there a way to show the character under the cursor in the statusline?

I already use %b\ (0x%B) to display decimal and hexadecimal value of the character. I would like to display the char itself as well before these two.

Answer 1

There's no predefined item (as listed under :help 'statusline', but you can implement this with a custom expression (item %{...}):

let &statusline .= "%{matchstr(getline('.'), '\\%' . col('.') . 'c.')}"

(I'm using :let instead of :set to avoid having to escape all spaces; it's more readable this way.)

getline('.') obtains the current line, and the character under the cursor is retrieved via the special \%c atom that matches at a certain column; col('.') is the current column. The . then matches the character there, and matchstr() extracts it.