GNU bug report logs - #43632
Raw bytes printed as latin-1 in echo area and *Messages*

Previous Next

Full log

View this message in rfc822 format

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: Mattias Engdegård <mattiase <at> acm.org>, 43632 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#43632: Raw bytes printed as latin-1 in echo area and *Messages*
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2020 16:22:10 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

> It is not an anomaly.  If you want to see escapes, set
> print-escape-nonascii non-nil.
>
> Also note that what you see is the result of 'eval' printing the
> result, the real result (as returned by prin1) is a unibyte string:
>
>   (multibyte-string-p (prin1 "\377")) => nil
>
> (Yes, this is very confusing.)

Could we do something about this confusion?

This came up because I just couldn't make sense of what I was seeing
when trying to work with raw bytes -- it seemed to be that Emacs was
auto-promoting unibyte strings (with bytes >127) to multibyte strings...
until I started calling multibyte-string-p on everything instead.

I'm guessing I'm not the only person confused by this stuff.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.