Subject: Re: bug#1187: 23.0.60; Cannot read vline.el - invalid read syntax

From: Lawrence Mitchell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:58:19 +0100

Hi Drew:

Drew Adams wrote:
>>> For me, the file vline.el downloaded from the above address loads
>>> successfully even without setting LANG to "C".  Just a simple "C-x
>>> C-f" works and doesn't throw any errors.

>>> Either the version of vline.el Drew used is different, or something
>>> else is at work here.  Drew, are you using the patched
>>> EmacsW32 binary produced by Lennart?  If so, perhaps it's something
>>> that is being triggered by the patches.  Or maybe something in Drew's
>>> .emacs customizations?

>> I think Drew is using the unpatched version.

> Correct.

>> And I can see this problem with both the unpatched and the patched version.

>> However there might be a misunderstanding. There is no error while
>> reading vline.el. The error comes when I do eval-buffer.

> Yes, the problem arises when I load (so, eval) the library. But
> Lawrence and Eli both mentioned loading also.

I think the problem is a bad interaction between your language
environment and the file in question.

Does the following command load vline.el successfully?

emacs -Q --eval '(let ((coding-system-for-read (quote utf-8)))
(load-file "path/to/vline.el"))'

?

For me, the above works regardless of my LANG environment
variable however:

LANG=en_US emacs -Q --eval '(load-file "path/to/vline.el")'

Loading /Home/s0198183/tmp/vline.el (source)...
Invalid read syntax: "?"

In this case, emacs uses the iso-latin-1 coding-system to open
the file and barfs when trying to read the utf-8 character in it.

Cheers,
Lawrence
-- 
Lawrence Mitchell <[email-masked]>