Re: garbage chars when pasting French chars into emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:41:42 -0500
> From: ken <gebser@mousecar.com>
> 
> Just to be comprehensive I'll state at the outset that I'm using Linux 
> (CentOS 5.7), so this is the environment emacs is working in.  From a 
> shell I get this:
> 
> $ set|grep -i lang
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> 
> Now I pull up a webpage with some French on it: 
> <http://www.wikilivres.info/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty>.  Examining the 
> source code of this page, I see at the top:
> 
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
> 
> So this page is presented in UTF-8.
> 
> Firefox is also set to present pages in UTF-8: View -> Character 
> Encoding -> UTF-8
> 
> But when I copy and paste the text from "Francais" to "invisible, 1964)" 
> inclusive, many of the characters aren't rendered correctly; I get 
> "garbage" characters in their stead, e.g., the second-to-last line 
> appears something like this:
> 
>      * L^[$(B!G^[$(C)+^[(Bil et l^[$(B!G^[(Besprit, Gallimard, 1960
> 
> Other lines are improperly rendered also.
> 
> I'd like to fix this.  And if possible understand why this doesn't work, 
> so I might be able to diagnose these problems for myself.

What is your value of selection-coding-system?  Try setting it to
something like ctext-with-extensions.