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Re: Using utf-8 and only utf-8
From: |
Nikolaj Schumacher |
Subject: |
Re: Using utf-8 and only utf-8 |
Date: |
Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:17:46 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.2.50 (darwin) |
dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs) wrote:
> I get this same question, "what coding system?", sometimes, like
> sometimes when grabbing some text from a wikipedia entry.
>
> Not knowing anything about these coding systems, their history,
> etc, I haven't a clue as to what to answer!
>
> For someone like me often grabbing ascii[-like?] files from eg
> wikipedia, would a choice of utf-8 be reasonable?
What do you mean by grabbing? Copy & paste or downloading?
> Again, it's for what seems and looks to me (on screen) like plain old
> ascii.
If it really only contains ASCII characters, it doesn't matter if you
call it ASCII, UTF-8 or something like Latin-1. They only differ in the
way "other" characters are encoded. UTF-8 can encode pretty much every
character known to man, and is becoming more and more popular. It is a
very reasonable choice for storing data.
When it comes to receiving data, you'll have to rely on the sender to
specify the coding system. Wikipedia uses UTF-8, as you can see in the
HTML header.
> And what would you have me stick into my .emacs, then?
Do you use unix? Then you only need to specify the correct locale
(e.g. en_US.UTF-8) and Emacs should pick it up.
regards,
Nikolaj Schumacher