Re: Making re-search-forward search for \377

[Tyler Spivey <tspivey@pcdesk.net>]

Xah <xahlee@gmail.com> writes:

> what's the C-q 377 char?
>
> if i press Ctrl+q 377 Enter, i get this char: ÿ, which is LATIN SMALL
> LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS (unicode U+00FF).
>
> Then if i do:
>
> (re-search-forward "ÿ")
>
> it works perfectly.
>
> as far as my experience goes, the ease of programing with unicode in
> elisp beats Perl and Python hands down...

I'm probably going to end up working with binary data in a temp
buffer. Doing more research, I want enable-multibyte-characters to be
off. Given that, if we go to *scratch*
and run M-X toggle-enable-multibyte-characters until that variable
becomes nil, doing C-Q 377 RET gives 0xff, which is what I want
(according to C-x =, C-u C-x = and M-x describe-char). Now to
match it, I try:

(re-search-forward "\xff") - no luck

What did you use to figure out that the multibyte version of that
character was 0x00FF? I found it out accidentally as a lisp error, but
none of the previously described commands (C-X =, M-X describe-char or
C-u C-x =) will show that it is 0x00ff, they just show FF.