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Lately my documents dissolve into misinterpreted Unicode, for example α becomes \316\261. What could be the cause for that?

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  • When you say "lately," do you mean that the same file was readable previously but is not readable now? What have you changed recently?
    – Dan ♦
    Jul 5 '16 at 18:04
  • I just found out that it happens upon restarting Emacs. It might be related to Spacemacs. Perhaps I should just create a GitHub issue.
    – Lenar Hoyt
    Jul 5 '16 at 19:33
  • The standard way to handle this sort of question is to start Emacs without your init file (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.
    – Dan ♦
    Jul 5 '16 at 20:00
  • Outch, this even happens with emacs -Q and it happens only with this particular file. Perhaps some special character throws the encoding detection off course?
    – Lenar Hoyt
    Jul 5 '16 at 22:15
  • Other editors have no problem decoding the file. I will try to produce a minimal example.
    – Lenar Hoyt
    Jul 5 '16 at 22:16
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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.

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