Re: prompt: "Select one of these safe coding systems"

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 24 Nov 2002, D. Goel wrote:

> [1] It seems I cannot get emacs to follow a system I want (utf-8) by
> default.  It still tries other systems and then shows me utf-8 among
> the list of choices.  What am i doing wrong?

How did you try to achieve that?  The right way is to use 
prefer-coding-system, I think.

> [2] If emacs cannot "safely" encode, how do i ask it to please not
> prompt me, but simply select the first from the "safe" "alternatives"
> shows me?

IIRC, you can't.  Wrong encoding is deemed a disaster (because it could 
lose information and corrupt your precious files), so Emacs always prompts.  
The only exception is when the buffer's coding-system is undecided and 
the buffer can be encoded using the language environment's default 
encoding.  For example, if you start with a pure-ASCII text and then add 
Latin-1 characters to it, and your language environment is Latin-1, then 
Emacs will silently use Latin-1 encoding when you save the text.

> [3] Any other hints or workarounds, considering this situation?
> I really want to get rid of this prompt :(

Just don't type characters that cannot be encoded with the buffer's 
file-coding-system ;-)

> esp. since the prompt
> shows up for not me but for an infobot, which is supposed to be run
> noninteractively.

Non-interactive Lisp programs can bind coding-system-for-write to 
something appropriate before they invoke functions that write to files.

> I don't care too much how it stores any
> international characters that may have shown up, as long as it stores
> the 99.9% english part just fine---i just want emacs to select
> somethigng and just do it.

If the encoding of non-ASCII characters _really_ doesn't matter (but 
please think carefully about this and make a few experiments before you 
decide, since the results might surprise you), then bind 
coding-system-for-write to raw-text.