Re: Text copied from *grep* buffer has NUL (0x00) characters

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> For the detection of NULs in UTF-8 files, you could also ask for such
>> a feature via `M-x report-emacs-bug` but it should be pretty easy to get
>> something comparable with something like:
>> [...]
>
> I don't think it is desirable for users to install such Lisp hooks to deal
> with such corner cases.

There's a tension between avoiding pitfalls and making it inconvenient
for corner cases.

I do think there's a real plain bug here, tho, if you change your
"recipe" to `uft-8` instead `utf-8-with-signature`: take a utf-8 text
file (in a UTF-8 locale), add a NUL byte to it, save, close, and
re-open: you now get a unibyte buffer showing the bytes rather than
the chars.

Emacs should generally try and warn you when saving a file with a coding
system different than the one it would guess when later re-opening the file.
The problem doesn't show up with `utf-8-with-signature` because
apparently the BOM is given more weight than the NUL byte in determining
which coding system to use.

> My opinion is that Emacs should be more helpful here by default.

No point arguing here then: make it a bug report.

`help-gnu-emacs` is rather for the case where you're looking for
a workaround (or when you suspect what you're seeing is a "feature" you
just fail to understand) rather than fixing it "for everyone".


        Stefan