Re: Special Characters

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2015 18:37:34 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Ian Baylis <ibay0918@gmail.com>
> Injection-Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 01:37:34 +0000
> 
> I have a file that has special characters in it.   When I open the file in 
> Emacs an ' is represented like:
> \200\231 or just \231
> 
> What type of characters are they and is there a list of those characters I 
> can use as reference for the future.

Those are not necessarily "special".  They could be normal characters
that Emacs failed to decode, because other parts of the file were
encoded inconsistently, or because it used the locale-specific
defaults, and the file didn't tell it needs to be decoded differently.

Are you sure this is not a UTF-8 encoded file?  What happens if you
visit it with "C-x RET c utf-8 RET C-x C-f FILE-NAME RET"?