bug#13505: Bug#696026: emacs24: file corruption on saving

[Rob Browning]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> More to the point: there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding
> here regarding the effect of selecting an encoding at save time.  It
> sounds like the OP thought that selecting a "literal" encoding, such
> as raw-text, which is supposed to leave the binary stream unaltered
> (apart of the EOL format), will ensure that a buffer will be saved
> exactly as it was originally found on disk.  But this is false.  What
> raw-text and no-conversion do is to write out the _internal_
> representation of each character without any conversions.  The
> original encoded form of the characters as found on disk at visit time
> _cannot_ be recovered by saving with raw-text, because that encoded
> form is lost without a trace when the file is _visited_ and decoded
> into the internal representation.  The only information that's left is
> the coding-system used to decode the characters.  But since the file's
> encoding in this case is inconsistent, that coding-system cannot be
> used to save it back (Emacs will not let you do so, as demonstrated in
> the report), and therefore the original form cannot be recovered this
> way.

Ahh, right; that make sense to me.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
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