Re: `decode-coding-string' question

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Pogonyshev <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 23:34:21 +0300
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> There is indeed a misunderstanding.  The characters in the buffer _are_
> decoded.  However the characters form C escape sequence, like "\xc2\xa9"

Right, I see the problem now.

> To know what character is encoded by this C sequence, I first translate
> strings "\xc2" and "\xa9" to the appropriate (undecoded!) characters.
> The resulting string of length 2 is encoded in UTF-8 and I decode it
> to receive the copyright character or whatever.

Why not use `(decode-coding-string "\xc2\xa9" 'utf-8)' right away?  It
gives me the right character directly.

Btw, why don't we have a feature in cc-mode to transparently decode
and encode such strings when the source file is read/written?  If
detecting the encoding is an issue, we could for starters ask that
users state that in some file-local variable.