Re: Buffer-local variables affect general-purpose functions

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> How to compare bytes, then?

It depends on what kind of comparison one wants.  Simplest is to use 
'='.  To ignore case and treat bytes 128-255 as Latin-1 characters, use 
'downcase' first.  To ignore case and treat bytes 128-255 as 
uninterpreted bit patterns, use 'unibyte-char-to-multibyte' before 
downcasing.  Etc.

> we don't have a way of distinguishing between characters and
> bytes, unless we look on something besides the arguments themselves.

Yes, that's right.