Re: Questions on charset encoding detection and keyboard layout

[Hou, Ruoyu]

Dear Zaretskii,

Before switching to Emacs I've been using EmEditor, a proprietary editor 
under Windows. It could auto-detect those files with different encodings 
and prompt a coding list in statistical confidence order for me to 
determine the most likely file encoding. So I guess it may implements 
certain statistical algorithm to detect the proper encoding.

I also tried MadEdit, an open source cross-platform editor. So far it 
could automatically decode files it handled even without the need for me 
to choose a likely one. I am not skilled to read its source code so I 
can't tell how it is done. Also I don't know how MULE handles the coding 
detection case.

A friend of mine, a Vim user, showed me handling those different 
encodings by ":set fencs=(a list of possible encodings, the point is to 
put euc-jp before gbk)". It seems to be done by calling libiconv and 
libintl(or gettext, I'm not sure).

I just thought that my Emacs should perform better or at least 
equivalent with these softwares.

Thanks for your help. I am actually using the commands you mentioned to 
set encodings for viewing or saving. The classification for document 
storage is a good idea and habit, only if I had the foresight. It's a 
bit unrealistic when facing a large quantity of unsorted documents in 
different encodings already on the disk and constantly increasing (as I 
always complain, why can't those guys just use UTF-8?). Is it possible 
to for example write a script to distinguish and sort those documents?

Regards,

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:42:39 +0800
> > From: "Hou, Ruoyu" <phoenixhou@gmail.com>
> >
> > I tried the tip you gave me, but now I've got my GBK-encoded files 
> > unreadable. How you would solve the problem?
> >
> > Moreover, as I mentioned in the previous post, how could I set a 
> > prefer-coding-system without beforehand knowledge about the encoding I 
> > am supposed to encounter?
>
> If you have many documents in different encodings that Emacs cannot
> distinguish by itself, then I'm afraid there's no good solution except
> "C-x RET c", which requires that you know the encoding in advance.  At
> least I'm not aware of any better way.  What do other applications do?
>
> Of course, if you inadvertently visit a file without knowing the
> encoding, and want to re-visit it with the correct encoding, after you
> notice that Emacs didn't properly decode it, then typing "C-x RET c
> CORRECT-ENCODING RET M-x revert-buffer RET" will fix the problem.
> Here CORRECT-ENCODING is the correct encoding of the file.
>
> Also, if you could somehow manage to have documents in different
> encodings to reside in different directories, then perhaps you could
> set up the directory-local variables to cause Emacs decode the files
> in each directory correctly.  See the node "Directory Variables" in
> the Emacs user manual for details about this feature.

--
Hou, Ruoyu

Laboratory of Reproductive & Stem Cell Biology,
College of Life Science & Biotech.,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Shanghai 200240, P.R.China.