Re: converting between charsets

[Stefan Monnier]

> It fails. Its default value contains element

> ("^\\(fido7\\|relcom\\)\\.[^,]*\\(,[  \n]*\\(fido7\\|relcom\\)\\.[^,]*\\)*$" 
> koi8-r
>   (koi8-r))

> and my post to fido7 hierarchy go in utf-8 anyway.

[ I don't know if your settnig is correct and supposed to work,
  but I'll assume it is.  ]

Then please report this as a bug with M-x report-emacs-bug (or directly to
the Gnus guys, but be sure to include the kind of information included in
M-x report-emacs-bug).

> Let's first talk about encoding regions. Why does not it work with
> encode-coding-region?

It works.  Any evidence that it doesn't?

> What about garbage, if encoding/decoiding works I can always decode
> into internal representation and encode into desired charset in
> send-hook.

Not always: decoding+encoding can't always be exact inverses of each other.

> I would be happy to get an answer on question: "How do I decode and
> encode in Emacs?"

It's not the right question.  The question you seem to want to ask is "how
do I change the way Emacs's package FOO encodes/decodes my object BAR?"

SM> So one way to do it is to take care of the encoding yourself, which may
SM> amount to doing the whole "send" yourself (i.e. the NIH approach).
SM> Or the

> NIH?

Not Invented Here: the typical reaction of reinventing your own wheel rather
than try to adapt the ones you're already using (but which you haven't built
yourself).

SM> other way is to figure out how to tell the code that already does the
SM> encoding to use koi8 rather than utf-8.

> There is no such code right now, and, probably, I will write it.

You complain that it uses utf-8, so somewhere a piece of code encodes the
text into utf-8.

>>> 1. Paste into Emacs frame works strange:
SM> What text did you paste?  Where does it come from?
> I type some Russian text in xterm and paste in into Emacs, have a look
> at the attached screenshot.

Oh, I see.  I don't know enough of how this works to help you much further.
If you hit C-u C-x = on the various chars (especially on two similar chars
displayed with different fonts), you'll see that they come from different
charsets (one is probably something like iso-8859-5 and the other may be
unicode).  Emacs-22 doesn't unify them by default.  You can try to put
(unify-8859-on-decoding-mode 1) in your .emacs.  And you can also try to
play with utf-fragment-on-decoding.  And ask someone more knowledgeable
about such problems.

You could even M-x report-emacs-bug about it, since maybe the default config
in a cyrillic locale should already take care of it.

>>> Cyrillic nput in emacs -nw in xterm still does not work, if I just
>>> change X keyboard layout.
SM> 
SM> That doesn't give us much to go on, does it?  What does it do, other than
SM> "not work"?

> It beeps.

What does C-h l show after hitting a particular key?


        Stefan