Re: How to get rid of Microsoft dumb quotes, e.g. \222 for apostrophe?

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

> My apologies as I know this topic has been covered before, but despite
> much Googling I haven't found a simple, direct solution to the
> problem.

> I have just started seeing lots of nasty stuff like \222 instead of
> apostrophes in working on text files in Emacs on XP, then trying to
> reformat these files for LaTeX. My guess is I picked this garbage up
> when I copy-and-pasted some material out of Word, though I'm not
> certain. Emacs on XP displays these characters fine when I am just
> working with a .txt or .org file - which is why I didn't pick up on
> the problem earlier.

> I am looking for a simple function or .el package that will remove the
> garbage and replace it with latin1 encoding or whatever is acceptable
> to LaTeX. I have done lots of Googling but haven't come up with
> anything that doesn't refer to gnus (which I don't use) or which
> doesn't get me lost in talk of this encoding system or that. A search-
> and-replace function will do fine - and I will even write it myself if
> someone gives me a tip on how to get started (again, I'm not a lisp
> expert).

An alternative solution to the one you request might be to open the file
using the `windows-1252' coding-system rather than `latin-1'.

	C-x RET c windows-1252 RET C-x C-f <thefile> RET

or if you have a recent Emacs, you can just revert the buffer with
a different coding system:

	C-x RET r windows-1252 RET


-- Stefan