Re: Setting file encoding in a modeline

On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 2:37 PM A. Wik <awik32@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It seems to me that a modeline would be a convenient place to set the
> encoding used for a file. However, while it does set 'fenc'
> accordingly, the file is not loaded and displayed according to this
> setting.
>
> Bram said reading is tried with each encoding in fencs until one
> succeeds. Why not reload the file with the correct encoding once a
> modeline with a fenc setting has been read?
>
> -Albert.

You are against a chicken-and-egg problem here: the modeline can only
be interpreted after the file has ben read into a buffer, and that is
too late for setting the 'fileencoding'. For a disk file at least,
there are the following ways to circumvent that problem:
(a) By setting the 'fileencodings' (plural) heuristic to something
starting with "ucs-bom,utf-8" without the quotes and in that order,
then any Unicode file with BOM, and any UTF-8 file with or without a
BOM, will be correctly detected. (A side-effect is that files in 7-bit
ASCII will be detected as UTF-8 but this is not a bug: indeed, UTF-8
and US-ASCII represent anything between U+0000 and U+007F
identically.) The default setting of "ucs-bom, utf-8,default,latin1"
is an example of this method.
(b) For other files whose charset you know in advance, see :help ++enc
(c) If a file is read by mistake in the wrong encoding, reread it
immediately in another (guessed) better charset. You may need to try
several times until it looks right. Example, for a Japanese file
mistakenly read in Latin1
:e! ++enc=sjis
The exclamation mark discards any possible changes and rereads the file "as-is".

Best regards,
Tony.

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