Re: [angeli@iwi.uni-sb.de: Coding problem with Euro sign]

[Ralf Angeli <angeli@iwi.uni-sb.de>]

* Kevin Rodgers (2005-12-15) writes:

> Ralf Angeli wrote:
>> * Kevin Rodgers (2005-12-14) writes:
>>>I think the OP is confused: 
>> 
>> Was confused.  That was cleared up on emacs-pretest-bug.
>
> Good!  I hope you didn't take offense at my remark.

Oh well ... something like that was to be expected as my knowledge
about coding systems is only improving slowly. (c:

>>>And the OP should try visiting the file with the cp1252 coding system.
>> 
>> Well, the question now is if it is possible for Emacs to figure out
>> the coding system on itself with the example at hand.
>
> You could try something like this:
>
> (setq auto-coding-regexp-alist
>        (cons '("[\040-\177][\200-\237]" . cp1252)
>              auto-coding-regexp-alist))
>
> I don't think that's a general purpose solution since (1)
> auto-coding-regexp-alist actually has precedence over `-*-coding:-*-'
> file variables and (2) other encodings probably use those o200 - o237
> bytes (certainly other Microsoft Windows code pages do).

This doesn't seem to work here.  I still see the byte codes of the
8-bit characters when opening the file after evaluating the above
form.

And a customization is actually not what I am interested in; I'd like
Emacs to figure this out by itself, out of the box.

I am not sure how common something like the case at hand is but it is
certainly not academic.  And if one is working with different
operating systems or interchanging files with people working on
different operating systems the failure to detect the correct coding
could lead to people regarding Emacs as a truly inferior piece of
software.  I can already hear them: "What?  It displays the Euro sign
as \200?  Even Notepad gets this right!"  On these grounds it may
become a bit hard to convince people that Emacs is the one true
editor.

Anyway, I tested a bit and under Windows (surprise) every application
I tried (e.g. Notepad and OpenOffice) managed to display the file
correctly.  On GNU/Linux no application got it right.  I checked with
less, more, vim, nano, pico, and OpenOffice.  Either "garbage" was
displayed or (in case of OpenOffice) a dialog asking the user to
specify the encoding.  So it's not like Emacs isn't in good company.
Nevertheless it would be nice if Emacs got it right.  Unfortunately I
lack the knowledge for judging if this is possible at all without
having to use all sorts of unreliable heuristics which are costly to
implement.

-- 
Ralf