Re: \201\236 appearing in emacs.desktop

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2017 17:20:50 +0200
> From: tomas@tuxteam.de
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> > --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> > Coding system for saving this buffer:
> >   U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)
> [...]
> > --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
> 
> Pretty unsurprising. Sorry I can't say where those \201\236 are
> coming from. Emacs is able to transparently represent "byte values"
> which would be an encoding error within an otherwise UTF-8 encoded
> buffer (actually it uses an extension of UTF-8 for that). To display
> that, it resorts to those octal escapes, \nnn.

\201 will not happen in UTF-8 encodings.  It most probably comes from
some encoding like Shift-JIS or whatever.

Perhaps the OP should show more of the corrupted file (use
find-file-literally to avoid corruption by decoding), it could give
more hints.