Thanks again! I already have shell scripts to take care of such characters for me, which operate on entire files. Having a function like this would help for certain regions of a file. :-)
However, it does bug me a bit that some vim motions do not work exactly as intended. Going in, I knew evil-mode would have some gaps. But I assumed those would be some esoteric operations, and not something that I use daily.
Hermen Hulst must not have heard of !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works