Re: how to scan file for non-ascii chars (eg cut-n-paste from ms-word)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs)
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: 8 Jan 2011 19:53:01 -0500
> 
> When I 'cut-n-paste' from eg ms-word-produced document, into an
> emacs buffer (ie ascii), you get all kinds of "non-ascii" chars,
> eg left and right double-quotes, like these:
> 
> 
> Char: . (8221, #o20035, #x201d) point=250 of 4096 (6%) column=7
> Char: . (8220, #o20034, #x201c) point=218 of 4096 (5%) column=42
> 
> 
> accents, and so on.
> 
> When I go to save the buffer, emacs will ask if I want to
> save it in eg japanese format.  Not exactly what I want.

Doesn't it suggest utf-8 as one of the possible encodings?  If so, why
not use utf-8 and leave these characters in the file?

> What I'd like to do is change those "strange" characters
> to their plain-ascii "equivalent", so to speak.  Like
> '"' for double quote (left OR right), etc.

Not sure why would you want that, but doesn't M-% solve this problem
nicely?  If not, why not?