Re: Coding warning attributes to wrong char

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Yuchen Pei <id@ypei.org>
> Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2023 14:22:18 +1000
> 
> These default coding systems were tried to encode the following
> problematic characters in the buffer ‘encoding.txt’:
>   Coding System           Pos  Codepoint  Char
>   utf-8-unix               23  #x3FFFE2   \342
>                            24  #x3FFF80   \200
>                            25  #x3FFF99   \231
> 
> However, each of them encountered characters it couldn’t encode:
>   utf-8-unix cannot encode these: \342 \200 \231
> 
> Click on a character (or switch to this window by ‘C-x o’
> and select the characters by RET) to jump to the place it appears,
> where ‘C-u C-x =’ will give information about it.
> 
> Select one of the safe coding systems listed below,
> or cancel the writing with C-g and edit the buffer
>    to remove or modify the problematic characters,
> or specify any other coding system (and risk losing
>    the problematic characters).
> 
>   raw-text no-conversion
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
> 
> Despite the warning, the correct fix is to remove the nul character.
> 
> This can be quite misleading, especially when one wants to fix encoding
> issues in big text files.

What is your proposal for better dealing with this situation?

The basic problem here is that Emacs cannot know whether the null
characters are or aren't supposed to be in the file.  You as the user
do know, presumably because you know where this file came from or what
is its purpose.  But Emacs doesn't know.  It also cannot easily know
that removing the null character would solve all the other problems,
since it examines each such character individually.