> Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2018 09:04:14 -0400 > From: John J. Xenakis <hew...@jxenakis.com> > Cc: jxenakis...@gmail.com > > OK, it looks like the null byte was the major problem. That resolves > some mysteries like why the file looked ok in Notepad -- which > presumably just deletes null bytes.
I'm glad we have that figured out. > Since a null byte has such huge consequences, one thing you might > consider is displaying a message, "Your file contains null bytes," > when such a file is loaded, or a string with a null byte is pasted. It might be a good feature to add this, so I suggest to request it via report-emacs-bug. However, one problem with such messages is that they quickly go away, especially if there are other messages after that. In general, whenever the modeline shows "=" in the left corner, meaning that the file was visited with no decoding, and you didn't explicitly request that (e.g.by invoking find-file-literally), you should immediately suspect null bytes and search for them with the likes of "C-x C-q C-SPC". > Anyway, thanks for all your help. It's a big relief to have this > problem resolved. You are welcome. My suggestion to change the preferred encoding was because even after removing the null byte, Emacs didn't decode the non-ASCII characters correctly. But maybe that's because my Windows locale is different from yours.