Re: Detecting BOM for UTF files

[Benjamin Riefenstahl <Benjamin.Riefenstahl@epost.de>]

Hi Sébastien,


> Andreas Schwab a écrit :
>
>> ??? UTF-8 does not need a BOM, it's an 8-bit encoding.

Sébastien Kirche <sebastien.kirche@sage.com> writes:
> Mmmh, FAQ of Unicode.org explains that there exists one BOM for
> UTF-8 too :

There is no contradiction.  You *can* add a BOM to UTF-8 text, it just
doesn't serve a purpose, because UTF-8 doesn't have a "byte order" to
mark.  In addition, the BOM makes text manipulation more difficult, so
it is actually not recommended by the Unicode standard.

> Anyway, do I have to understand that it isn't poosible to guess type
> without BOM ?

No.  Current versions of Emacs can handle UTF-8 automatically without
additional packages.  You just have to configure it right.  Have a
look at the function prefer-coding-system.

If you have further questions, you should probably post them to an
Emacs user list or newsgroup like comp.emacs.


benny