Re: garbage chars when pasting French chars into emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:00:37 -0500
> From: ken <gebser@mousecar.com>
> 
> >> Following your advice, I ran
> >>
> >> (set-selection-coding-system 'ctext-with-extensions)
> >>
> >> and then did the same copy-and-paste again.  This got more of the 
> >> characters correct, but not all of them.
> 
> Looking again, I see my eyes must have been malfunctioning for the text 
> pasted into emacs is rendered correctly.  However, when I try to save 
> the text, I'm presented with the minibuffer message "Select coding 
> system (default iso-2022-jp-2): ".  At the same time a second buffer 
> opens under the first giving the options for coding system:
> 
> ===================================================================
> These default coding systems were tried:
>    mule-utf-8-unix iso-latin-1
> However, none of them safely encodes the target text.
> 
> Select one of the following safe coding systems:
>    iso-2022-jp-2 x-ctext iso-2022-7bit raw-text emacs-mule no-conversion
>    ctext-no-compositions iso-2022-8bit-ss2 iso-2022-7bit-lock
>    iso-2022-7bit-ss2 tibetan-iso-8bit-with-esc thai-tis620-with-esc
>    lao-with-esc korean-iso-8bit-with-esc hebrew-iso-8bit-with-esc
>    greek-iso-8bit-with-esc iso-latin-9-with-esc iso-latin-8-with-esc
>    iso-latin-5-with-esc iso-latin-4-with-esc iso-latin-3-with-esc
>    iso-latin-2-with-esc iso-latin-1-with-esc
>    in-is13194-devanagari-with-esc cyrillic-iso-8bit-with-esc
>    chinese-iso-8bit-with-esc japanese-iso-8bit-with-esc
> ===================================================================
> 
> Entering "utf-8" into the minibuffer, of course, doesn't work.  Frankly, 
> I'd like to save into utf-8

You can't, not with Emacs 21.  In that version, the same character in
different character sets was treated as 2 different characters.  Also,
the mule-utf-8 character set didn't include the Latin-1 characters.

The only suggestion I have is to try iso-latin-1-with-esc (you will
see above that this is one of the possibilities suggested by Emacs),
it should at least produce a Latin-1 encoded file, which will be
easier on you later.

You really need to upgrade your Emacs, if you want to use UTF-8.