Re: how to scan file for non-ascii chars (eg cut-n-paste from ms-word)

[Teemu Likonen]

* 2011-01-18 19:54 (UTC), David Combs wrote:

>>> What I'd like to do is change those "strange" characters to their
>>> plain-ascii "equivalent", so to speak. Like '"' for double quote
>>> (left OR right), etc.

> What'd be nice is something that went through the whole buffer *once*,
> doing the "right thing" with each non-ascii char.

I don't know if Linux system's "iconv" utility is available in other
operating systems but at least GNU/Linux users could do it with this:

    C-u M-x shell-command-on-region RET iconv -t ascii//translit RET

with the region being the whole buffer. RET means <Enter> key, in Emacs
speak.