Re: ediff displays gibberish output

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <address@hidden>, Leo <address@hidden> writes:

> * Eli Zaretskii (2006-12-17 06:30 +0200) said:
>   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>> From: Leo <address@hidden>
>>> Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2006 03:15:59 +0000
>>> 
>>> But a file with eight-bit characters can have a correct diff
>>> output. What makes ediff fail where diff succeeds?
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean, but my crystal ball says that you are
> > looking at the output of Diff in a terminal that supports UTF-8
> > encoded characters.  If that's the case, then you will only see
> > correct output from Diff with UTF-8 encoded files; other encodings
> > will show gibberish.
> >
> > By contrast, Emacs does not support a single encoding, it supports
> > many different ones.  It needs to know the right encoding to display
> > the characters as readable.

> I mean in emacs running diff-buffer-with-file or vc-diff. The diff
> output displays correctly.

That's perhaps because Emacs reads the output of process
while decoding by a detected coding system.  That method
works for your test case, but fails in a case that two files
contain non-ascii characters in different encoding
(e.g. UTF-8 vs GBK).

---
Kenichi Handa
address@hidden