Character Set Support

Supported Character Sets

We should decide which character sets to support for each/all plugins. Other character sets could be specified outside of this set and they would be ignored if not understood by the editor. This is simply a list of character sets that all plugins should attempt to support at a minimum.

• UTF-8, BOM deprecated.
• UTF-16, LE/BE, BOM unspecified.
• Latin-1

If an implementation wishes to define a new character set, it is recommended that it consults outside authorities such as the WHATWG Encoding Standard and the IANA Character Set registry. Using a special prefix such as x- is neither required nor recommended, as unsupported values are simply ignored.

Setting character sets in text editors

Vim

Vim character encodings can be set with the filencoding command (see documentation).

Setting UTF-8

set fileencoding=utf-8

Setting Latin1

set fileencoding=latin1

Emacs

As noted here, Emacs character encodings and end-of-line formats are both set using the set-buffer-file-coding-system command.

Setting UTF-8

(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8-dos)
(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8-mac)

Setting Latin1

(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'iso-latin-1-unix)
(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'iso-latin-1-dos)
(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'iso-latin-1-mac)