Re: address@hidden: setting utf-16 as file-name-coding-system locks up emacs]

[Stefan Monnier]

> I see.  But what if the test that file-exists-p does was to encode the
> "test-string" first in the same encoding? Or maybe this would be crazy,
> this isn't exactly my area of expertise. :)

I do not understand what you are trying to say here.  The problem is that
(file-exists-p "/") needs to turn the stream of *characters* "/" into
a stream of *bytes* (which is what the encoding is for) and if you specify
the wrong encoding you might get the wrong bytes, so the OS will of course
not find the corresponding file.

> Anyway, the conclusion of all this seems to be that Emacs is not 100 %
> ready for unicode yet so I have to avoid to try torture it with these in
> the meantime... :)

While the unicode support is not finished (and probably never will be given
the amount of detail you can get into if you care to), it has nothing to do
with the problem at hand.  The only valid conclusion here is that your file
names are not encoded in utf-16 and thus you get what you deserve if you
wrongly tell Emacs to use utf-16 encoding for filenames.


        Stefan