Changed character set in file is not picked up

[Gunnar P. Vestergaard]

Really, I don't know if this is a feature request or a bug report.

First I must thank you for making so good support for character sets. I 
frequently use Emacs v21.2.1 for editing files in UTF-8 and ISO 8859-1.

One time, when I was working with a file in Emacs, I decided that I 
would convert the character set that the file was encoded in. It was in 
UTF-8 and I converted it to ISO 8859-1 using the shell.

At the same time, the file was loaded into a buffer in Emacs. That is, I 
converted the file in the shell while it was in a buffer in Emacs. I 
forgot to delete the buffer when converting the file. Just to make sure 
that everything was allright, I visited the same file with the same file 
name into the same buffer. The minibuffer said "File file.txt changed on 
disk. Reread from disk? (yes or no) ". The file was loaded, but Emacs 
did not pick up the changed encoding. So I saw a lot of numeric codes 
prefixed with backslash.

Shouldn't Emacs be able to pick up a new character encoding when 
revisiting a file with the same file name? Of course, a workaround is to 
delete the appropriate buffer prior to converting a file's character set.

I am not subscribed to the list bug-gnu-emacs so I will appreciate if 
someone replies directly to my e-mail address.

Yours sincerely
Gunnar Vestergaard
Torshavn, Faroe Islands