copying certain characters from web browser to xemacs results in backslash followed by three numerals

[Adrian Aichner]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.emacs.xemacs as well.

"tpc247 at gmail.com" <tpc247 at gmail.com> writes:

> Adrian, here's the information you requested, respectively.  When I
> originally described the problem, I was on Windows 2000, but as of the
> writing of this email, I am on Windows Vista.
>
> <output of M-x describe-installation>
> OS version:
>
> Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
> OS: Windows_NT
>
> XEmacs 21.4.19 "Constant Variable" configured for `i586-pc-win32'.
>
>   Building XEmacs in "e:\\acs\\software\\XEmacsWindowsKit\
> \xemacs-21.4-2006-01-28\\nt".
>   Using compiler "cl -nologo -W3 -O2 -G5 -MD".
>   Installing XEmacs in "c:\\XEmacs-built\\XEmacs-21.4.19".
>   Package path is "~\\.xemacs;;c:\\XEmacs-built\\site-packages;c:\
> \XEmacs-built\\xemacs-packages".
>   Compiling in support for Microsoft Windows native GUI.
>   Compiling in support for XPM images.
>   Compiling in support for GIF images.
>   Compiling in support for PNG images.
>   Compiling in support for TIFF images.
>   Compiling in support for JPEG images.
>   Compiling in support for toolbars.
>   Compiling in support for dialogs.
>   Compiling in support for widgets.
>   Compiling in support for native sounds.
>   Compiling in fast dired implementation.
>   Using portable dumper.
>   Using system malloc.
>   Using DLL version of C runtime library
> </output of M-x describe-installation>
>
> I don't quite understand what you mean with the following block:
>
> <Adrian's text>
> and use
> ; C-u (universal-argument)
> ; C-x C-e (eval-last-sexp)
> ; at end of next line in an XEmacs buffer:
> (featurep 'file-coding)
> </Adrian's text>
>
> In a buffer, when I type Ctrl-u and then Ctrl-x Ctrl-e as I believe
> you requested, I immediately got the following response in the
> minibuffer:
>
> "Symbol's value as variable is void:" or "End of file or stream:"

I'd appreciate if our coding-system specialists could comment on this.

Here is what I can observe:

Ah, I missed to mention you should do this in the *scratch* buffer,
which will be in "Lisp Interaction" mode in a standard setup.

NB: In any buffer try
C-h m (describe-mode)
to find out which mode it is in.

>
> A publicly available url where such characters can be found is at:
> http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml

Ah, thanks.

>
> A description of how I create the buffer in XEmacs where I paste the
> characters to is, I start Windows, I execute Xemacs in the Start menu,
> then I click on File/Open... and I browse for the particular text file
> I use as an all-purpose container for my observations and reminders
> and notes to myself.

Ah, that could be part of the problem.

Try creating a new .txt file an paste there.

The file you're opening might force a certain coding system.

But I get the same problem in my mule-enabled
"XEmacs 21.5  (beta28) \"fuki\" (+CVS-20070629) [Lucid] (i586-pc-win32, Mule) of Sat Jun 30 2007 on TANG"

>
> The first occurrence of the undesirable behavior occurs when
> attempting to copy and paste the first paragraph, in the last line, at
> the character between "nature" and "human".

Do you get a "~" displayed instead?

That's what I get, with the pasted character being described as:

Char: — (U+2014 chinese-cns11643-1 33 55) point=1 of 1(0%) column 0 

That's what I get in a fundamental-mode buffer.

Page
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml
asserts it's charset=iso-8859-1:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
but then it contains
evolved nature&#8212;human nature
which doesn't make sense to me.

Above page is not "Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional" as it claims!

See
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.psychologytoday.com%2Farticles%2Fpto-20070622-000002.xml&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline

It doesn't complain about line 440 though (not sure whether this is
because of the many errors before that point).

>
> When I attempted to execute Alt-x describe-current-coding-system, I
> got the following response in the minibuffer:
>
> <output of M-x describe-current-coding-system>
> [No match]
> </output of M-x describe-current-coding-system>

Please try the test above in the *scratch* buffer and send us the results.

Adrian

-- 
Adrian Aichner
 mailto:adrian at xemacs.org
 http://www.xemacs.org/