Hi Peter, Thanks for taking the time to reply.  Though it was useful, I'm still confused about how to resolve this issue.  To be clear, when I posted yesterday, it was in emacs that I was seeing the extraneous characters, not in notepad.  However I just opened it again in notepad to check on the encoding and now I'm seeing the extra characters there as well.  So something must have changed when as part of trying to figure out what was going on, I saved the file in Emacs.  Emacs seems to be the culprit.  Is there something that I can put in my .emacs to tell it to save automatically in utf-8?  Or am I maybe still not understanding things. Thanks again. -ts1971  ________________________________ From: Peter Dyballa To: Tech Stuff Cc: "help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org" Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 3:50 AM Subject: Re: File Encoding Issue on Windows Am 12.03.2013 um 04:08 schrieb Tech Stuff: >  ¿En qué fecha llegaron > > when I should see: > > ¿En qué fecha llegaron The first line encodes the text of the last line in UTF-8 encoding, but is displayed to you in a different, an 8-bit encoding. In UTF-8 more than one byte, more than 8 bits, are used to encode the characters. Only the characters of the US-ASCII range (U+0001 - U+007E), i.e. the digits, non-accented characters, punctuation, are encoded by one byte. The character ¿, INVERTED QUESTION MARK, U+00BF, is encoded in UTF-8 as two bytes: C2BF. These two bytes are in Notepad interpreted as some Latin or MS Windows encoding, i.e. as two different characters, as  and as ¿, which are then displayed as such. The character é, LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, U+00E9, is encoded in UTF-8 as two bytes: C3A9. These two bytes are in Notepad interpreted as some Latin or MS Windows encoding, i.e. as two different characters and then displayed as à and as ©. In MS Windows code page CP1252 uses for encoding:     A9 = ©, COPYRIGHT SIGN     BF = ¿, INVERTED QUESTION MARK     C2 = Â, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX     C3 = Ä, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS So Notepad is using this code page, CP1252, to display the UTF-8 encoded file. What you need to do is to tell Notepad to use UTF-8. -- Greetings   Pete Give a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you've depleted the lake.