So, having played around a bit more I do have to make one correction.  It does appear that now I am able to enter the extended characters supported by the US International keyboard, even in the mini-buffer.  This must have been fixed between the old 22.x version I was running and the new 24.2 I just installed.  So that's good.  I also realized that the  character *is* supported by the US International layout so I actually can do the query replace for that particular example.  I still have the general problem though.  How do I for instance enter the character at codepoint 173 which is a soft hyphen (whatever that is) into the mini buffer? Thanks. -ts1971 ________________________________ From: Tech Stuff To: Axel E. Retif Cc: "help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org" Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 7:24 PM Subject: Re: File Encoding Issue on Windows Hi Axel, This is *exactly* what I want to do.  The problem is that I can't figure out how, using my US keyboard I can enter, say the 'Â' character.  I know it's codepoint (194), but I don't know how to enter that value into the mini buffer.  On a related note, I use the US international keyboard to type spanish.  Using this software I can get the 'é' character for example by typing an single quote followed by an 'e'.  This has always just worked in the main emacs edit buffer but not in the mini buffer.  I've always been able to deal with this limitation but it would also be a nice to get that working. Thanks. ________________________________ From: Axel E. Retif To: Tech Stuff Cc: "help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org" Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 5:38 PM Subject: Re: File Encoding Issue on Windows On 03/13/2013 05:48 PM, Tech Stuff wrote: > I don't have the backup files and I'm willing to do it the hard way. > I'm willing to do anything short of actually gonig in and changing every > occurrence individually as there are hundreds of them. I also change hundreds of occurrences of characters ``a la TeX'' in LaTeX files (say, \'{\i} for í, `? for ¿, etc.) with query-replace: Meta-Shift-% You can try   Meta-Shift-% At the minibuffer prompt   Query replace: type, say,     ¿ and at the prompt     Query replace  ¿ with: type     ¿ It will start showing each occurrence of ¿; you can type y for «yes, replace» n for «no». If after some occurrences you are satisfied with the results, you can type ! «to replace all remaining matches with no more questions». When you are in the Query-replace mode, you can type Control-? to see all the options. Best Axel