Subject: Re: bug#4157: 23.1.50; faulty character characterisation for ä

From: Peter Dyballa <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:50:53 +0200

Am 22.08.2009 um 06:09 schrieb Stefan Monnier:

>> When I launch GNU Emacs in an ISO Latin environment (env
>> LC_CTYPE=de_DE.ISO8859-15 LANG=de_DE.ISO8859-15 /usr/local/bin/
>> emacs-23.1.50 -Q &) and display in dired a directory with entries   
>> from some
>> month of March the "Mär" abbrevation for the German month  name  
>> "März" is
>> displayed as M\344r. C-u C-x = on this \344 reveals:
>
> Hmm... that looks like a problem in dired: the file names in the  
> output
> of `ls' should follow file-name-coding-system, whereas the rest of the
> output seem to use locale-coding-system.  Coudl you check if that's
> indeed the case:
> - create a file from the Finder using accented latin-1
>   chars, as well as non-latin-1 chars).
> - look at it in your dired and tell us what you see.

In both locales the *file names* are correct and also detected as  
containing "composed characters," it's a problem with the file's  
month date. In the ISO-Latin encoding the ä character is not  
recognised as that entity and part of the ISO Latin encoding, but as  
something strange which can only be displayed in octal  
representation. In UTF-8 this does not happen.

Isearch for example finds the \344 characters only as C-s C-q 3 4 4  
RET, while the character ä cannot be found (because composed, of a  
and ¨ and therefore a search for a succeeds, in both locales).

>
> On a Darwin system, I very warmly recommend to stick to utf-8 coding
> systems for everything, since it should avoid such problems.
>

Yes, you're right. I was trying to work on a problem with a "Carbon  
Emacs" ...

--
Greetings

   Pete

One cannot live by television, video games, top ten CDs, and dumb  
movies alone.
				– Amiri Baraka, 1999