Re: Questions on charset encoding detection and keyboard layout

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2009 03:51:50 +0800
> From: "Hou, Ruoyu" <phoenixhou@gmail.com>
> 
> Before switching to Emacs I've been using EmEditor, a proprietary editor 
> under Windows. It could auto-detect those files with different encodings 
> and prompt a coding list in statistical confidence order for me to 
> determine the most likely file encoding. So I guess it may implements 
> certain statistical algorithm to detect the proper encoding.

This feature still awaits a volunteer to be added to Emacs.  It
shouldn't be too hard, I think.

> A friend of mine, a Vim user, showed me handling those different 
> encodings by ":set fencs=(a list of possible encodings, the point is to 
> put euc-jp before gbk)".

The customization I suggested, i.e.

  (prefer-coding-system 'euc-jp)

was supposed to make euc-jp of higher priority than GBK (and
everything else).  However, I understand it did you more harm than
good.

For more fine-grain control, try calling set-coding-system-priority
for every encoding you need to deal with, and in such an order that
the resulting list returned by coding-system-priority-list would show
the encodings in the order you want them.  (These two functions are
documented in the ELisp manual.)  I'm not sure this will have the same
effect as ":set fencs" in vim, though.

> The classification for document 
> storage is a good idea and habit, only if I had the foresight. It's a 
> bit unrealistic when facing a large quantity of unsorted documents in 
> different encodings already on the disk and constantly increasing (as I 
> always complain, why can't those guys just use UTF-8?). Is it possible 
> to for example write a script to distinguish and sort those documents?

I would try to find a program that could print a file's
encoding. `file' does not do that, but maybe there's something else
out there.