RE: those funny non-ASCII characters

["Buchs, Kevin" <buchs.kevin@mayo.edu>]

I am reposting some of my questions from last Friday (plus a few more),
as I am still seeking assistance and there has been a lot of water over
the dam on this list.

Xah suggested I embrace Unicode. So I could use (prefer-coding-system
'utf-8) or the file variable: -*- coding: utf-8 -*-. Are there drawbacks
to the former? What about opening an ASCII coded file? Can emacs
properly detect it or does it come up as UTF-8? Or is there another way
to go Unicode automatically? If I embrace Unicode, then should I make my
Org-mode files no longer plain text?

I assume that if my lisp library files are encoded utf-8, then I can
paste that UTF-8 character from the web page into my call to
(replace-string ...) in order to substitute the longer dash of Unicode
U+2013 with an ASCII hyphen or double hyphen. But, how does that really
work? If the lisp file is encoded utf-8, then how can I put an ASCII
character in the replacement string? Or do I need to encode the hex
value of the ASCII character(s)?

Kevin Buchs | Senior Engineer | SPPDG | 507-538-5459 |
buchs.kevin@mayo.edu
Mayo Clinic | 200 First Street SW | Rochester, MN 55905 |
http://www.mayo.edu/sppdg