Weird character sequence at end of a few lines is messing up my c executables

I'm taking over code from the previous programmer and am running into problems with one of his c executables. Specifically, this script opens up a file and reads it in one line at a time (using fgets), then processes it. However in a few instances, instead of reading in one line it's reading in multiples (which it's not supposed to do).

When I open up the original text file in vi the offending lines have a ^@ sequence at the end. So for example there might be lines like

Hello there ^@
How are you doing ^@
That's great.

Although this is three lines, fgets is reading it as

Hello there How are you doing That's great.

Now the ^@ sequence is not a carat following by an @ sign. For example, the file is separated by form feeds (ascii value 12). When I look at it through vi, however, it shows up as ^L. This ^@ must represent a sequence similar to the form feed (again, it's not simply the same as typing ^@). So my questions are:

1. What is the ^@ sequence? If I knew, I could do a search and replace.
2. Is there any way that I can force c to treat it like a new line character?

Thank you for any help that you can give.

fgets reads until it encounters a new line. You will have to convert the form feeds to new lines.

Actually, the situation is more like

Hello there ^@
How are you doing ^@
That's great.
^L

The ^L is the actual form feed character, which is used to separate a record. I have no idea what the ^@ is, so don't even know how to search for (and thus replace) it.

However, I rewrote the previous programmer's script in Perl. Perl simply disgarded those ^@ characters, so I at least got my project done. However, it would be interesting to know what exactly tha ^@ sequence is. In any event, thanks for the help.

You can always look at the file in hex mode and see what that particular sequence is.