Re: How to keep character encoding in text file...

[pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)]

Marko Myllymaki <firstname.lastname@iki.fi> writes:

> I usually work with UTF-8 encoded files and my system is set up for
> UTF-8 (text may be in english, finnish, swedish, german, russian...)
>
> However, sometimes I edit latin1 -encoded files and I would like to
> have the encoding automatically kept that way when saving files. Now
> it seems to change unwantedly to UTF-8 sometimes... I have to use
> iconv command line tool to change this...
>
> So... if I load UTF-8 encoded file, emacs always saves it that way. If
> I open latin1-encoded file, it should keep it in the original
> encoding.

I don't know if there's an easy way to do that.


> Maybe something to put in .emacs to achieve this...

The easiest way is to put a comment on the first two lines containing:

-*- coding:iso-8859-1 -*-


Alternatively, you could put a comment in the last 512 bytes of the file containing:

Local Variables:
codingl iso-8859-1
End:



Otherwise, you may use the file extension, or the file location  (or
really any regexp on the file path) to determine the encoding,
customizing the file-coding-system-alist variable.

(push '("^/some/dir/latin-1-files/.*" iso-8859-1 . iso-8859-1)
       file-coding-system-alist)

(push '("\\.iso-8859-1$" iso-8859-1 . iso-8859-1)
       file-coding-system-alist)

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__