Re: What does Emacs on w32 know that grep can't figure out?

[Juanma Barranquero]

> This file is maybe a text file, maybe not.

It's a text file, but not ASCII. It's encoded as Emacs is telling you:
utf-16, with signature, in little-endian order (it starts with FF FE).

>  Its value is
>  utf-16le-with-signature-unix

Curious. I get utf-16le-with-signature-dos, consistent with the file
having CRLF (which it does).

> However trying to search this file from a cmd prompt with (gnuwin32)
> grep does not work. And it does not work with cygwin grep either. They
> think it is a binary file

It is. This is unrelated to Emacs. The grep tools you're using do not
support utf-16 text.

> (even though I changed the line delimiter to unix style).

Ah, that explains the -unix above.

> What is going on?

I hope this is clearer now.

> Is grep sometimes useless on w32 now, or?

It will be useless whenever you try to grep a file in a coding system
the grep tool does not support...

> (How do we
> handle that in Emacs?)

How do we handle what? If you mean, how can Emacs read the text just
fine... Emacs has supported UTF-16 and many other coding systems for
years.

As for what can you do,

C-x <RET> f iso-latin-1-unix <RET>

then save.

    Juanma