[Resending from my "vm rocks" gmail account. I hope Julian intended it to go to the mailing list! -- Uday]
>Oh, perhaps you are saying they are "binary" as opposed to "ASCII". I think >that is a matter of view point. No, it's not. You said "7-bit US ASCII", which means what it says: no bytes with the high bit set, all to be interpreted according to ASCII. >You can load a utf-8 folder into VM but, if there are any multibyte codes in >there, they will get interpreted as separate characters. You can't search Indeed. >You are probably thinking of the folder as being made up of bytes as opposed >to characters. That is a fine view point to take as long as you don't care >to search. But searching is what this thread is about! The folder is made up of bytes. There's no getting round that. Come to that, *any* file is made up of bytes. It doesn't get converted to characters until it's read into an Emacs buffer with a given coding system. In VM's case, folder files are read into folder buffers with the binary coding system, and so the folder buffer is also a sequence of bytes (which are punned with characters 0 to 255). It's inherently impossible to meaningfully treat a folder as a sequence of characters - unless you already know that all the characters in it are represented in the same coding system.
