Re: Cut buffers and character encoding

[Jan D.]

Romain Francoise skrev:
> Hi,
> 
> I received a bug report about Emacs 22.0.90 stating that Emacs doesn't
> do charset conversion when receiving text from a cut buffer.  From the
> report:
> 
> ,----
> | When I paste the cut buffer in an Emacs window in UTF-8 locales, Emacs
> | doesn't do any charset conversion. This problem occurs with both X and
> | GTK versions.
> |
> | To reproduce the problem:
> | 1. In UTF-8 locales: emacs -q
> | 2. Open an xterm.
> | 3. In the xterm, type 'éèê'.
> | 4. Select 'éèê' in the xterm.
> | 5. Quit the xterm (now, 'éèê' is no longer in the primary selection,
> |    only in the cut buffer, which Emacs supports).
> | 6. Paste in Emacs (middle mouse button).
> |
> | I get:
> |
> | \351\350\352
> |
> | instead of:
> |
> | éèê
> `----
> 
> This is in apparent contradiction to what the docstring of the
> `selection-coding-system' variable says:
> 
> ,----[ C-h v selection-coding-system RET ]
> | Documentation:
> | Coding system for communicating with other X clients.
> | When sending or receiving text via cut_buffer, selection, and clipboard,
> | the text is encoded or decoded by this coding system.
> `----
> 

The text encoding for cut buffers are defined to be ISO-Latin-1, so
selection-coding-systemshould not have any effect.  That said, we could decode
data from cut buffers from Latin-1 and encode to Latin-1 when putting data in
there.

But cut buffers are obsolete anyway, so I vote for just fixing the
documentation and leave it as is.

Other suggestions?

        Jan D.