Re: converting octal escape sequences to utf-8 and back

[Stefan Monnier]

> I am trying to use emacs to interface with a program that treats
> utf-8 characters in its input and output as octal escape sequences.
> So the program's output contains ascii strings like "\302\247",
> which I want to display within Emacs as "§". Likewise, I want to
> feed text containing utf-8 characters such as "§" into this program.
> So I need to convert these utf-8 characters back to their respective
> octal escape sequences. What is the proper way to achieve this?

You can try to convert the \302 and \247 to/from bytes by using `read'
and `prin1' (since Emacs also uses such a notation for its own Elisp
strings).  As for converting those bytes to/from chars, just use
(en|de)code-coding-string.


        Stefan