>>> "Yuri" == Yuri Khan <yurivkhan@gmail.com> writes:

   > On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 3:10 PM Uwe Brauer <oub@mat.ucm.es> wrote:
   >> Maybe I am missing something elementary here. I came across with a file
   >> which still had quoted printable encoding like this
   >> 
   >> Buenas d=C3=ADas:
   >> 
   >> So I used
   >> (quoted-printable-decode-region (region-beginning) (region-end) nil)
   >> 
   >> But I obtained the following
   >> 
   >> Buedas d\303\255as:

   > quoted-printable-decode-region gives you a byte string. You are then
   > supposed to decode that into text using whichever character encoding
   > you know is used. (Quoted-printable encoding, unlike URL
   > percent-encoding, does not mandate UTF-8. In RFC 2822 mail, the
   > character encoding will be given in the Content-Type header’s charset=
   > parameter. =C3=AD looks like a quoted-printable encoding of UTF-8
   > encoding of the character U+00ED LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH ACUTE.)

   > As a shortcut, you could pass the character encoding as the last
   > argument to q-p-d-r, but that is described as deprecated in the
   > docstring.


Thanks, but now I am confused. I have that file, with 
 Buenas d=C3=ADas:

How can I translate/decode that to latin1 or utf8? Or are you saying
that this is not possible. 


Hm, The file indeed is a complete email, which was never sent.

Ah: I found a way to display that text.  In gnus I use 


gnus-group-make-doc-group 


give the name of that file and then visit that group with gnus.  Indeed the chars are displayed
correctly. Problem solved. 

Still don't know what to do if the file had no mail header.

Thanks for clarifying the issue a bit to me.