Re: guide to emacs encoding?

[Stefan Monnier]

> I often come across problems when using files that have been written by
> other people.  Mostly it's French texts and as those people use
> different encodings than I do, accented characters aren't displayed
> correctly or I get lots of ^M escape caracters instead of carriage
> return.  I would like to know whether there is a guide to how one can
> handle different encodings using gnu emacs on a linux system.

Depends on the specifics.  Based on your email address, I'd guess you
normally write in German, but French and German typically use the same
encoding (latin-1 or latin-9) so there shouldn't be any problem.  OTOH you
mention ^M issues, so maybe your French texts come from Windows and for some
reason Emacs doesn't handle that correctly.  Also Windows uses variants
of latin-1 and latin-9, so you may be seeing chars that are not in your
own encoding.

The only general answer is to use C-x RET c before opening the
problematic files.  A better one is to use file-coding-system-alist,
assuming all the problematic files have something in common in their
filename (e.g. they're all in the same directory).

But if you can give us more details (e.g. your locale, and some example of
problematic file and what it looks like on screen), we can probably do
better,


        Stefan