Re: Automatic recognition of some specific coding systems

[Yuri Khan]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 9:31 PM, Jürgen Hartmann
<juergen_hartmann_@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Most of the text files that I have to work with are encoded with one
> of the coding systems
>
>    utf-8-unix
>    latin-9-unix
>    cp850-dos
> […]

Now that Eli has suggested a direction of your search, I’ll go in and
suggest another.

The general problem you’re solving is that of encoding detection.
There exist ready-made solutions for that, e.g. by computing byte
frequencies and matching them against known character frequencies in
your language. One of these is called enca.

Googling for “emacs enca” yields a post by Dmitriyi Paduchikh in
gnu.emacs.sources, dated 2007.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-emacs-sources/2007-06/msg00037.html