Re: Emacs utf-8 coding system

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

John Russell <jorussel@cisco.com> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> John Russell <jorussel@cisco.com> writes:
>>
>>> "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>>>
>>>>> From: Thomas Beresford <number18@spymac.com>
>>>>> Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 05:37:29 -0700
>>>>> 
>>>>> I wanted to know how can I install the utf-8 coding system in my
>>>>> emacs 20.7.2, because when I use `M-x list-coding-systems' I don't
>>>>> get the utf-8 listed here.
>>>>
>>>> There was no support for UTF-8 in Emacs 20.x.  Please upgrade to
>>>> Emacs 21.3, the latest version, to get that support.
>>>
>>> I have been trying to read .reg files which contain exports of parts
>>> of a windows registry in emacs, and all I get is junk.  I've been
>>> told that this is because the registry is output in unicode.
>>> Notepad can read these and so can vim on linux.  Is there any way I
>>> can view these types of files in emacs? Thanks.
>>
>> There was no support for UTF-8 in Emacs 20.x.  Please upgrade to Emacs
>> 21.4, the latest version, to get that support.
>>
>> I doubt that 5-year old versions of vim can read the files in UTF-8,
>> either.  Emacs 20.7 is just so last-millennium.
>
> I was not the original poster and am not using emacs-20.*.  I just
> got emacs-21.4.1 yesterday and the reg file still looks like mostly
> control charaters.  I tried C-x Ret f and a few encodings, but
> nothing seems to change

Well, of course it depends on the settings of your language
environment.  utf-8 can't be detected reliably in all circumstances.
C-x RET f does not change the interpretations of the characters in
your buffer, but with what encodings they will get saved again.

You have to specify the coding system already when loading the file,
like with

C-x RET c utf-8 RET C-x C-f crap.reg RET

If you already loaded the file, you need to reload:

C-x RET c utf-8 RET C-x C-v RET

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum