Re: [vile] How to convert \?nn strings to characters?

[Thomas Dickey]

On Mon, 1 Nov 2010, Thomas Dickey wrote:

> On Mon, 1 Nov 2010, Chris G wrote:
>
> > I have a number of files created a long time ago which have 'extended
> > ASCII' characters in them which are encoded in a way that vile doesn't
> > understand (at least the way I have it set up it doesn't).
> >
> > They appear as follows in vile and xvile:-
> >
> >    \?B1       \?B9      \?A1
> >
> > the four character sequence above is what vile/xvile shows for a single 
> > byte
> > of my files.  Is there any way I can get vile/xvile to recognise and 
> > display
> > these characters and/or a way to get the files saved in a more currently 
> > recognised
> > encoding.  All my current systems use a UTF-8 locale.
>
> If your system has the corresponding 8-bit locale installed, then
>
> :setl fk=8bit
>
> for the given buffer should should the characters as you intended.
                              show

> For _saving_ in a different encoding... vile doesn't really do
> that (recode can do it).

vile could be made to automatically convert 8-bit encoding to UTF-8
as it reads a file (not a hard change).  Currently it just reads
data into a buffer assuming that everything matches.

Going the other way is harder of course, except for the trivial
cases of ASCII and ISO-8859-1.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net