Re: IBM code page 850 -> Latin1

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Christophe TROESTLER <Christophe.Troestler@umh.ac.be>
> Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 18:32:15 +0100 (CET)
> 
> I was wondering whether somebody successfully solved the following
> problem: I work under Unix and edit my files with the ISO 8859-1
> character coding.  Sometimes however, I receive DOS files in the
> cp-850 coding.  I can recode them forth and back to the ISO 8859-1
> coding with the `recode' program but would prefer Emacs to do that for
> me (in any case I want to see the file with accented letters but be
> able to decide whether to save it in cp-850 or ISO 8859-1).  I have
> been fiddling with the iso-cvt package without luck.

Emacs 20.x supports DOS codepages directly.  To activate that support,
do this

   M-x codepage-setup RET 850 RET

Thereafter you can use coding system cp850 as you use other coding
systems.  For example, "C-x RET c cp850 RET C-x C-f /foo/bar RET" will
visit the file /foo/bar and decode its contents from codepage 850.

Note that each cpNNN coding system only supports characters which have
equivalents in the respective ISO-8859-X character set.  DOS codepages
frequently include graphics characters that are not part of the ISO
charsets; for these, cpNNN will produce a special code 127 decimal.

You can read more about codepage support in the Emacs on-line manual,
in the section named "International Support on MS-DOS" (node "MS-DOS
and MULE").