Determination of character encoding (was: Re: Using utf-8 and only utf-8)

[ken <gebser@mousecar.com>]

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On 09/14/2008 05:12 PM David Combs wrote:
> In article <mailman.17642.1219801733.18990.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
> Maurí­cio  <briqueabraque@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Nikolaj Schumacher a écrit :
>>> Maurí­cio <briqueabraque@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Is it possible to set something
>>>> in .emacs so that emacs will
>>>> always, no matter what, save any
>>>> file in utf-8 (even those that
>>>> were not utf-8 when they were
>>>> open)?
>>> Yes, edit `file-coding-system-alist'.  But I'd leave some of the
>>> exceptions (e.g. ".elc") in there.
>>>
>>>
>>> regards,
>>> Nikolaj Schumacher
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> I just added this to my .emacs:
>>
>> (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
>> (modify-coding-system-alist 'file ".*" 'utf-8)
>>
>> Is it the proper way of doing that? (Sorry,
>> beginner question�)
> 
> I get this same question, "what coding system?", sometimes, like
> sometimes when grabbing some text from a wikipedia entry.
> 
> Not knowing anything about these coding systems, their history,
> etc, I haven't a clue as to what to answer!
> 
> For someone like me often grabbing ascii[-like?] files from eg
> wikipedia, would a choice of utf-8 be reasonable? 
> 
> Again, it's for what seems and looks to me (on screen) like 
> plain old ascii.
> 
> And what would you have me stick into my .emacs, then?
> 
> 
> THANK YOU!
> 
> David

David,

This reply isn't going to answer your question directly, but hopefully
will be helpful, if not to you, then perhaps to someone else reading here.

To determine which character encoding a webpage is, what I do (in
Firefox) is click on "View", then run the mouse pointer down to
highlight "Character Encoding"; this brings up a submenu which will show
a little dot prepended to the character encoding used on that particular
page.  Once in a while, if a more rare encoding is used, I'll have to
push the pointer further, onto "More encodings" and search around the
several submenus there before I find the sought-after prepended dot.



ken

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