Re: coding-system perfectionism locks user out

[Kenichi Handa]

Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> writes:
>>>>>>  "Dan" == Dan Jacobson <jidanni@deadspam.com> writes:
Dan>  I do 
Dan>  $ lynx -dump 
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/3847/sapienti/hagfa99b.htm
Dan>  > hagfa99b.txt 
Dan>  $ emacs -q hagfa99b.txt I go into options>mule
Dan>  and the choice to set coding system is blanked out... what's
Dan>  worse, its keystroke isn't even mentioned in the menu.

That's because the file is detected as a binary file and
read into a unibyte buffer.

> What?  I  tried what you do.  No  problem, except that I  have to tell
> Emacs that  this file is in BIG5  encoding.  You can do  that with C-x
> RET  c chinese-big5  RET  C-x C-f  hagfa99b.txt  RET.  I  see what  is
> expected in traditional Chinese characters.

At the head of that file, this is described:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
There are a number of (double byte) characters shown here
which are not part of the Big5 set. This is because the
input was developed in HongKong, and HK standards (Big5 with
extentions) were used.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Actually, line 39 contains this (\231 is one byte code):
        ... ban3 \231G
The byte sequence `\231' `G' is not what Emacs treats as
Big5 code.  That's why Emacs doesn't detect that file as
big5.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp