Re: local chars displayed as numbers

[Reiner Steib]

On Tue, Oct 03 2006, Kenichi Handa wrote:

> In article <address@hidden>, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> > I don't think it uncommon.  People migrate from Windows to GNU/Linux
>> > (or switch between both), people exchange files with Windows users,
>> > ... (and on Windows, it's quite common to insert `smart quotes' and
>> > other non-Latin-1 characters).
>
>> True, but in my experience plain-text files using windows-1252 are still
>> rather uncommon under GNU/Linux.

Richard wrote:

,----[ http://mid.gmane.org/address@hidden ]
| I agree with those that say editing Windows text files is more common
| than editing binary files with Emacs -- even on GNU/Linux.
`----

>> Of course, it depends on the specifics, but adapting Emacs to the
>> specific circumstance should be done via the .emacs, I think.

BTW, I didn't get any answer to my question
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.pretest.bugs/14020/focus=14143>:

,----[ <news:address@hidden> ]
| What would be the best way to do this in ~/.emacs?  Like this?
| 
| (prefer-coding-system 'windows-1252) ;; Prefer windows-1252, but...
| (prefer-coding-system 'iso-8859-1) ;; ... give Latin-1 a higher priority.
`----

> What is the conclusion on this matter?  As I don't know the
> current situation about the usage of windows-1252, I have no
> idea.
>
> (1) Keep the curren code.

(5) If we decide to keep it, we should probably also add windows-1254
    which is a superset of iso-8859-9 (Turkish) and windows-1255 which
    is a superset of iso-8859-8 (Hebrew) accordingly.  (I don't know
    if the situation is comparable to Latin-1/windows-1252.)

> (2) Cancel the change for windows-1252.
> (3) Cancel the change for windows-1252, and implement the \0
>     byte detection now (before the release).

This approach (with "Cancel the change for windows-1252") won't fix
the original problem.

> (4) what else?

I did some tests with (see attached auto-coding.tar.gz)...

(a) a file containing only windows-1252 characters,

(b) a file with some Latin-1 text plus "reserved characters"
    (i.e. chars not defined in windows-1252),

(c) a file with some Latin-1 and windows-1252 text plus a null-byte.

Emacs detected the files as:

(a) windows-1252 (-> correct)

(b) raw-text-unix (-> correct)

(c) windows-1252 (-> slightly incorrect, at least for people who argue
    that binary is better here)

If null-byte detection is easy to implement, I'd suggest:

(6) Implement null-byte detection (to prevent binary files
   mis-detected as windows-12xx), keep the current code (windows-1252)
   and add windows-1254/1255 accordingly.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

auto-coding.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data