Re: Using utf-8 and only utf-8

[Nikolaj Schumacher]

dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs) wrote:

> I get this same question, "what coding system?", sometimes, like
> sometimes when grabbing some text from a wikipedia entry.
>
> Not knowing anything about these coding systems, their history,
> etc, I haven't a clue as to what to answer!
>
> For someone like me often grabbing ascii[-like?] files from eg
> wikipedia, would a choice of utf-8 be reasonable?

What do you mean by grabbing?  Copy & paste or downloading?

> Again, it's for what seems and looks to me (on screen) like plain old
> ascii.

If it really only contains ASCII characters, it doesn't matter if you
call it ASCII, UTF-8 or something like Latin-1.  They only differ in the
way "other" characters are encoded.  UTF-8 can encode pretty much every
character known to man, and is becoming more and more popular.  It is a
very reasonable choice for storing data.

When it comes to receiving data, you'll have to rely on the sender to
specify the coding system.  Wikipedia uses UTF-8, as you can see in the
HTML header.

> And what would you have me stick into my .emacs, then?

Do you use unix?  Then you only need to specify the correct locale
(e.g. en_US.UTF-8) and Emacs should pick it up.



regards,
Nikolaj Schumacher