Summary: There has been a change in how emacs handles a paste of text that includes so-called smart quotes and other special characters. How can I turn them into ordinary ASCII characters?
Details: I am running GNU Emacs 22.3.1 on of 2008-09-96 on SOFT-MJASON. On windows XP SP2. This used to work in emacs 21. Sometimes a Microsoft Word document, Outlook email, or other programs will use special characters outside the ASCII range to represent open and close quotations marks, apostrophe, dash, etc. I select the text that contains those characters. In emacs version 21 when I pasted them into an emacs buffer they became characters such as octal 223 and octal 224. Now they become these characters. Char: " (342396, #o1234574, #x5397c) (Open quotation mark) Char: " (342397, #o1234575, #x5397d) (Close quotation mark) #x53979 apostrophe #x53973 dash I have a macro that I found a while ago in http://www.eskimo.com/~seldon/dotemacs.el that starts like this: (defun hack-charset-netscape-to-oem (start end) (interactive "r") (save-excursion (format-replace-strings '( (In my actual _emacs init file there is a single character that displays as \222 i.e. octal 222. But in this email I typed it as 4 separate characters.) I tried adding these 2 lines; ("\U0005397c" . "\"") ; open double quote ("\U0005397d" . "\"") ; close double quote But they fail, saying, "unsupported Unicode code point U+5397c" for the first line above. (I found that format for Unicode characters in some emacs help.) What am I doing wrong? Is there a list of the common characters to replace with their near ASCII equivalent? Thanks, Steve -- Steven Tolkin There is nothing so practical as a good theory. Comments are by me, not Fidelity Investments, its subsidiaries or affiliates.
