Re: automatically replacing, e.g., <DF>, by umlaut?

[Anselm Helbig]

Hi Ulrich!

> Hi, I often have the problem that when I copy and past some text from
> the console into Emacs, the umlauts are shown as sequence of
> characters <DF> or \317 (number may be wrong).
> 
> Is there some function to automatically replace these strings by the
> corresponding umlaut?
> 
> I know that the best solution would be to have the proper language
> setting, font, character mapping, aso.  But for years now, I failed to
> get it right and there is no sign that this could change.

Well, of course there is no built-in function to correct what
shouldn't be broken in the first place. I've got 

  (setq selection-coding-system 'utf-8) 

in my .emacs and everything seems to work fine - I'm on Ubuntu 8.04
with Emacs 23. Maybe you should start emacs with the -Q switch so that
it doesn't load your customizations and start to find the culprit /
experiment with different coding systems.

Try C-x <RET> x, C-x <RET> X, and of course 
M-x customize-variable selection-coding-system until this works. 

A workaround might be to save the pasted text in a file and explicitly
open this file with another coding system, 

  C-x <RET> c

is your friend here. 

What emacs version are you using? What OS are you on? It might be
worthwhile to try out the current development version of emacs if
you're not running Emacs 23 already. 

HTH, 

Kind regards, 

Anselm


-- 
Anselm Helbig 
mailto:anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com