Re: ISO-8859-1 encoded file names and UTF-8

[Karl Eichwalder <keichwa@gmx.net>]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:

> And what is the value of `default-file-name-coding-system'?  If it's
> anything but `utf-8', please try setting `file-name-coding-system' to
> `utf-8' and see if that helps.

I did ask for help; I reported a problem worth fixing ;)  It is a
reather serious problem, IMO.

> This would contradict the whole purpose of a multilingual Emacs: it is
> meant to seamlessly display characters from different character sets
> without any special effects.

This might be appropriate when you use Emacs for reading mail and
news.  But it's a wrong behavior when it come to "source code"

> How can Emacs know that in this particular case, you want it to
> display different character sets differently?

When a XML file or a PO file (that's a message file used by gettext) is
declared as UTF-8 encoded and Emacs detects an error within such a
file, it's surely worth notifying the user.

> I believe that if such a feature is added, it must be driven by
> user-level settings.  For example, users could define a list of
> character sets or codepoints which they don't expect to see in their
> buffers, and Emacs will then flag characters from those sets with some
> visual cue.

Yes, approximately.  But instead of a list of character sets it must
depend on a list of file types (.xml, .po, .java, etc.).

> It's even possible that you can do that yourself right now by using
> hi-lock.el or something similar, since IIRC regular expressions can be
> used to express character categories.

Thanks for advice :) I know how to work around the problem; for checking
.po files one can use 'msgfmt' etc.  I'd rather vote to change Emacs to
make users happy -- that's probably not that urgent, but it should
happen for the next major release coming from CVS HEAD.

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