Re: iso-8859-1 and non-latin-1 chars

[Dave Love]

On querying a change, handa referred me to a thread which lead to it.
The archive loses threading info, sorry.

> Ok, I've just installed this change.
> 
> 2002-11-18  Kenichi Handa  <address@hidden>
> 
>         * language/cyrillic.el (cyrillic-iso-8bit): Make it safe.
> 
>         * language/european.el (iso-latin-1): Make it safe.
>         (iso-latin-2, iso-latin-3, iso-latin-4, iso-latin-5, iso-latin-8)
>         (iso-latin-9): Likewise.
> 
>         * language/greek.el (greek-iso-8bit): Make it safe.
> 
>         * language/hebrew.el (hebrew-iso-8bit): Make it safe.
> 
>         * language/lao.el (lao): Make it safe.
> 
>         * language/thai.el (thai-tis620): Make it safe.       

I think this is the wrong thing to do.  As rms said, it's a
user-visible change that affects more than Ispell.  It breaks the
principle that Emacs tries to avoid losing information in coding
conversions (whereas XEmacs readily trashes data).  If something uses
one of these encodings incorrectly now you can't recover the data as
you used to be able to.

Anyhow, if the issue is just Ispell, it's definitely the wrong fix.
ispell.el and similar stuff shouldn't send un-encodable text in the
first place.  (If `?' happens to be one of the extra word characters
for Ispell, you'll lose anyway.)

With the development source, you can easily fix what Stefan complained
about as follows.  There's more to it than that, though -- see the
comment in the diff.  I haven't had time to sort that out, though I
did make changes to Flyspell along similar lines.  That's easier,
since Flyspell already works word-wise (roughly), but of course you
likely run into problems displaying the choices without multilingual
menus.

[If you really wanted to fix such a thing just with a coding system
change, you could set up a scratch coding system for the job or
temporarily set a coding system property around the process setup.]

By the way, ispell.el in CVS isn't up-to-date with Stevens' version.

*** ispell.el.~1.133.~  Tue Nov 19 14:49:21 2002
--- ispell.el   Mon Nov 25 15:41:02 2002
***************
*** 1347,1364 ****
        (or quietly
            (message "Checking spelling of %s..."
                     (funcall ispell-format-word word)))
!       (ispell-send-string "%\n")      ; put in verbose mode
!       (ispell-send-string (concat "^" word "\n"))
!       ;; wait until ispell has processed word
!       (while (progn
!                (ispell-accept-output)
!                (not (string= "" (car ispell-filter)))))
!       ;;(ispell-send-string "!\n") ;back to terse mode.
!       (setq ispell-filter (cdr ispell-filter)) ; remove extra \n
!       (if (and ispell-filter (listp ispell-filter))
!           (if (> (length ispell-filter) 1)
!               (error "Ispell and its process have different character maps")
!             (setq poss (ispell-parse-output (car ispell-filter)))))
        (cond ((eq poss t)
               (or quietly
                   (message "%s is correct"
--- 1347,1369 ----
        (or quietly
            (message "Checking spelling of %s..."
                     (funcall ispell-format-word word)))
!       (if (and enable-multibyte-characters
!                (unencodable-char-position
!                 0 (length word) (process-coding-system ispell-process)
!                 nil word))
!           (setq poss (list word 1 nil nil))
!         (ispell-send-string "%\n")    ; put in verbose mode
!         (ispell-send-string (concat "^" word "\n"))
!         ;; wait until ispell has processed word
!         (while (progn
!                  (ispell-accept-output)
!                  (not (string= "" (car ispell-filter)))))
!         ;;(ispell-send-string "!\n") ;back to terse mode.
!         (setq ispell-filter (cdr ispell-filter)) ; remove extra \n
!         (if (and ispell-filter (listp ispell-filter))
!             (if (> (length ispell-filter) 1)
!                 (error "Ispell and its process have different character maps")
!               (setq poss (ispell-parse-output (car ispell-filter))))))
        (cond ((eq poss t)
               (or quietly
                   (message "%s is correct"
***************
*** 2604,2609 ****
--- 2609,2628 ----
    (let (poss accept-list)
      (if (not (numberp shift))
        (setq shift 0))
+     (if (and enable-multibyte-characters
+            (fboundp 'unencodable-char-position))
+       ;; Avoid sending un-encodable input to the process, which can
+       ;; specifically confuse the current implementation.  Fixme: Do
+       ;; it for 21.2 too.  Fixme: The implementation here needs
+       ;; changing to check word-by-word (according to syntax tables,
+       ;; not a fixed list of characters) from known positions in the
+       ;; buffer, not not looking for matches of ispell output (which
+       ;; may be inappropriately encoded, for instance) in the
+       ;; original buffer.
+       (dolist (i (unencodable-char-position
+                   0 (length string) (process-coding-system ispell-process)
+                   (length string) string))
+         (aset string i ?\ )))
      ;; send string to spell process and get input.
      (ispell-send-string string)
      (while (progn