Lately my documents dissolve into misinterpreted Unicode, for example α becomes \316\261. What could be the cause for that?
1 Answer
Emacs uses some heuristic to guess the encoding of the file. In this case it fails. No problem, just let Emacs know that the file uses UTF-8
encoding. You can do that after visiting the file with C-x RET r
or M-x revert-buffer-with-coding-system
. See (info "(emacs) Specify Coding")
for details.
emacs -Q
) and then recursively bisect your init file (ie, iteratively comment out half of it) until you find out what's causing the problem.emacs -Q
and it happens only with this particular file. Perhaps some special character throws the encoding detection off course?