Re: file coding problem for .emacs file

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:49:03 +0900
> From: ishi soichi <soichi777@gmail.com>
> 
> Hi. I normally set Emacs to that it can show Japanese characters, and it was
> fine until yesterday.
> 
> The comments in .emacs file are in Japanese.  And these comments have
> suddenly become corrupt.  All Japanese fonts are messed up and unable to
> read

Are the problems only with .emacs, or with visiting any file that has
Japanese text in it?

> 1. commented the entire .emacs file.  But no change.  The mode-line shows
> "-=:-- .emacs " so file-coding system must be wrong.

The `=' means .emacs was read as a binary file, with no encoding
conversions.  That would explain why you see it garbled.

> 2. I uncommented a part of the regular setting,
> 
> (set-language-environment 'Japanese)
> (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
> 
> and rebooted Emacs.  But it still gives the same problem.
> 
> 3. I implemented "set-buffer-file-coding-system" (default was nil).  Then I
> changed that to shift-jis and utf-8. It does no improve the situation at
> all.

What happens if you force Emacs to decode the file as UTF-8?  Like
this:

  C-x RET c utf-8 RET C-x C-f ~/.emacs RET

Does this show your .emacs correctly?

Also, try starting Emacs with "emacs -Q", then manually visit ~/.emacs
and see if it still displays garbled.