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

[Lennart Borgman]

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 1:58 AM, Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>> 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...


Yes, of course, that is actually what I am saying...

I actually think that there is no grep etc that handles this kind of
files on w32. Is there on *nix?


>> (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.

Using grep is an integral part of Emacs. If grep does not support the
coding then that part of Emacs will fail.


> As for what can you do,
>
> C-x <RET> f iso-latin-1-unix <RET>
>
> then save.

Yes, but that does not help if you have a lot of files you want to search.