Re: [h-e-w] crash recovery - punctuation displaying as octal codes

[Jason Rumney]

Joseph Buchignani <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I'm using EmacsW32 on XP. I had a crash. After reboot, the emacs file was
> corrupted. All punctuation marks - apostrophes, dashes, etc and chinese
> characters - now displayed as octal codes. I manually replaced some of the
> damaged punctuation with M-x string-replace. However the chinese characters 
> and
> exotic punctuations are irretrievable.

Are you talking about the original file, a backup file, or the autosave
file?

> I've read a lot of confusing information about setting character sets and
> encodings. But all that's working fine, I just need to recover the damaged
> octals.

Do you have any idea what the original coding-system that the file was
encoded in would be?  That would be one possiblity. utf-8-emacs could be
another, especially if the exotic punctuation now shows as two octal
codes rather than one, and the Chinese characters show as three or more
octal codes per character.  If you are using an older Emacs, it could
also be emacs-mule.

Most likely some part of the file is now corrupted so that Emacs can no
longer recognize it automatically as the encoding that it is. Forcing
the encoding will hopefully allow you to recover most of the original
data, if you know what the encoding originally was or can guess (if it
has Chinese characters - as opposed to Japanese or Korean, then the
choices of coding-system can be narrowed down.