Re: Encodings in Emacs.

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Nacho <ncc1701zzz@hotmail.com> writes:
[...]
> When I write text, I know how to change the encoding of the buffer to
> save it with the encoding I want, for example, EUC-JP, ShiftJIS, etc.
>
> When I open it again, I have not to tell Emacs the encofing of the
> file, he knows the encoding used.
>
> How can I know in what encoding is the file?

On the left side of the modeline there is a small indicator that is
meant to tell the file encoding of the current buffer. For example
for UTF-8 its is "u", for Latin-1 it is "1". You could look at that.

Or you could look at the value of the variable
`buffer-file-coding-system' with `C-h v'.

> Also, if I want to read a file in a specific encoding, how can I do
> that? Or similarly, to change the encoding of a buffer but re-decofing
> it. That is, if I  change the encoding with M-x
> set-buffer-file-coding-system it doesnt reencode the buffer. The use I
> want to do to this is when I read a file with several codings mixed
> (ShiftJIS and EUC-JP) and I want to read both.
[...]

When visiting a file, Emacs decodes that file into its internal
encoding `emacs-mule'. Emacs encodes this internal format then again,
when writing out the contents of the buffer. So when you do `C-x RET
f' (`set-buffer-file-coding-system') you don't change the encoding of
the buffer, you only tell Emacs to use another encoding when writing
the contents of the buffer out.

So the only way to get what you want is to tell Emacs which coding
system it should use to read that file *before* Emacs visits it. You
can do this with `C-x RET c'. For example:
`C-x RET c shift_jis RET C-x f your-file.txt RET'

But cautiion: I am not familiar with the encodings you mentioned, but
I think when you have a file with several encodings you will break
the parts with the "other" encodings, when you save that file.

    Oliver
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