switching between locales (esp. iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-15)

[Tapani Tarvainen <gn20050310T190208@tt.oma.it.jyu.fi>]

Is there any easy way to tell emacs to reinterpret (and display)
a buffer with a different encoding?

This sounds so basic but I can't figure out how to do it,
other than starting a new instance of emacs with different
locale.

In particular, I frequently have to deal with files in ISO-8859-1
and ISO-8859-15 codings, and while emacs is perfectly able to
display either correctly if it starts with the right foot, er,
with correct locale, I can't figure out how to make it change
its opinion of the encoding once it has opened the file.

E.g., if my locale is set to something with ISO-8859-1 encoding
and I open a file containing the euro symbol, it is displayed
incorrectly. That's fine, emacs had no way of knowing, but how
can I then tell emacs what the correct encoding is?

For now I simply exit emacs and start another with
LC_ALL=fi_FI@euro emacs
or something similar, but I hate doing that. It should
not be necessary to start a new emacs simply to edit
files with different encodings.

Please tell me I've missed something obvious.
It can't be this hard.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen