guide to emacs encoding?

[no_one_reads_it]

Hi there,

I often come across problems when using files that have been written by
other people. Mostly it's french texts and as those people use
different encodings than I do, accented characters aren't displayed
correctly or I get lots of ^M escape caracters instead of carriage
return. I would like to know whether there is a guide to how one can
handle different encodings using gnu emacs on a linux system.

Thanks for any hint
Matthias Knelangen
matthias at knelangen dot de