Re: recoding a buffer coding system

[Santiago Mejia <mejia@uchicago.edu>]

>> In the buffer *http www:wordreference.com:80* I see the character that
>> firefox displays as "ü" (u with umlaut) as \303\274.
>>
>>   When I try to copy
>> and paste it here in this e-mail, however, it appears as: "ü"
>>
>> As I said, however, if I merely save and reopen the file, the
>> characters get shown properly.

> Me, working in GNU Emacs 23.1.50 and 22.3, see no octal codes, I only
> see the bytes from the UTF-8 encoded umlauts etc. according to HTML
> property "charset=utf-8." The buffer is in actual no encoding at all,
> and so you're lucky that it's contents is saved as UTF-8! Therefore
> no information is lost and obviously GNU Emacs uses the proper
> encoding when it opens the *file* now.

This is strange.  I just installed emacs 23.0.60.1 (the emacs23 that
comes with Ubuntu --called emacs-snapshot) and I find the same exact
result: I still see the same \303\274 character for ü when I call:

(switch-to-buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously "http://www.wordreference.com/deen/grun"))

>> In case this is useful, in the buffer *http www:wordreference.com:80*
>> the variable 'buffer-file-coding-system' is mule-utf-8
>>
>
> In the end? When you re-open a second time?

No.  In the beginning, before saving (Actually, I save and re-open the file with a
different name).   When I re-open the file, buffer-file-coding-system is
utf-8-unix.

> Maybe using
>
>       (modify-coding-system-alist 'process "<some thing>"   'utf-8)
>
> makes GNU Emacs handle the buffer, associated with no file and with
> no process, more like it should...  I haven't found the proper
> setting!
>

I will try to use your suggestion, but this will entail going through
the documentation and try to understand it.  This weekend,
unfortunately, I will not have the time to do so.

Any further help is appreciated.

Santiago.