Re: Ispell and unibyte characters

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Imagine Catalan dictionary with iso-8859-1 "·" in otherchars and other
> dictionary (I am guessing the possibility to be more general, do not
> actually have a real example of something different from our Debian
> file with all info put together) with another upper char in
> otherchars, but in a different encoding (e.g., koi8r).

You're still living in Emacs-21/22: since Emacs-23, basically chars aren't
associated with their encoding (actually charset) any more.

> The only possibility to have both coexist as chars in the same file is
> to use multibyte UTF-8 chars instead of mixed unibyte iso-8859-1 and
> koi8r, so Emacs properly gets chars when reading the file (if properly
> guessing file coding-system).

Not at all, there are many encodings which cover the superset of
iso-8859-* and koi8-*.  UTF-8 is the more fashionable one nowadays, but
not anywhere close to the only one. e.g. there's also iso-2022,
emacs-mule, and then some.

> I'd however use this only in personal ~/.emacs files and if needed.

Why?  It would make the code more clear and simpler.

> That is true for files with a single encoding.  However, the problem
> happens when a file has mixed encodings like in the Debian example I
> mentioned.  I know, this will not happen in real manually edited files,
> but can happen and happens in aggregates like the one I mentioned.

That's an old solved problem.

> If file is loaded with a given coding-system-for-read chars in that
> coding-system will be properly interpreted by Emacs when reading, but
> not the others. Something like that happened with
> iso-8859-1/iso-8859-15 chars in

That was then.  Not any more.


        Stefan