Subject: Re: bug#19393: 25.0.50; Emacs cannot determine coding system of ISO-8859 encoded files

From: Tassilo Horn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 20:22:11 +0100

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> > However, according to the `file' command, the file is plain ISO-8859.
>> 
>> Looks like some kind of bug, although with such a large file, it's not
>> easy to be sure.
>
> Actually, I don't think this is a bug.  There are ISO-8859-15
> characters in that file that are not part of ISO-8859-1, so Emacs will
> not detect that encoding unless either (a) your locale dictates that
> encoding,

It doesn't.

> or (b) you change the preferences to prefer ISO-8859-15.

Is there a way to prefer ISO-8859-15 over ISO-8859-1?  The manual I can
only find the command `prefer-coding-system' which doesn't seem to do
what I want.  I wan't to reorder the "priority list for automatic
detection" so that ISO-8859-15 is before ISO-8859-1 but still UTF-8 is
the very first entry (as it's dictated by my locale).

> This is so with any 8-bit encoding -- EMacs cannot easily distinguish
> between them, and needs some guidance.

Ok, I see.  And as Wolfgang said, some chars in the file are encoded
wrongly using Windows-1250.  That probably adds to the problem.

Thanks for the explanation!

Bye,
Tassilo