Re: emacs, umlauts, x-windows text mark and paste

[Harald Maier <harald@maierh.de>]

josh buhl <uzs33d@uni-bonn.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> When I mark text in some other application that contains non-ascii
> characters, e.g. in mozilla from a german webpage containing ö ä ü ß,
> and paste it into an emacs buffer, than all the special characters get
> shown as control sequences. Here's an example:
>
> I mark this text in mozilla:
>
> Soße wird in einer extra Soßenschüssel...
>
> Paste it into my Emacs buffer and get this:
>
> So\x{00DF}e wird in einer extra So\x{00DF}ensch\x{00FC}ssel...
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. how can I get this to work properly?

Works fine for me out of the box. In mozilla the character coding is
Western ISO8859-1 or ISO8859-15.

>
> 2. which command could I execute in emacs to get it to switch the
> encoding of the current buffer, or whatever, so that the garbled
> characters magically get converted to what they're supposed to be?

C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system)

>
> 3. why is this like this?
>
> I've struggled with this problem _for years_ and never have found an
> easy solution. I'm running emacs 21.3.1 on debian testing under gnome
> 2.4 with english as the default language environment. I do know that
> if I log out, and log in setting the session language to german, then
> I can cut an paste german text into an emacs buffer with no
> problem. However, it's not enough to set the LANG variable: if I open
> a terminal, set LANG=german or de, and start emacs, it still doesn't
> work.

I am using as LANG environment de_DE or de_DE@euro. But it also works
fine with "C". As far as I know "german" is not a valid entry. In
emacs you can see the LANG value as follows:

M-: (getenv "LANG")

Harald