emacs-utf8

How to convince Emacs to save .arc files in UTF-8

The usual ways for telling Emacs to save files in UTF-8 format don’t work when saving a file with a “.arc” extension (at least in the version of Emacs I have). Apparently there was some ancient file archive format that had a “.arc” extension, so Emacs is quite determined to save the file in a binary mode. This writes out the Unicode characters in Emacs’ internal character representation, resulting in garbage.

Here’s how to fix this:

1. Type M-x customize-variable RET auto-coding-alist RET
2. Click on the first “INS” button (the one at the top).
3. For “File name regexp”, type \.arc\'
   (that’s backslash dot A R C backslash single-quote, or else copy and paste it from here to there).
4. For “Coding system”, type utf-8
5. Click on the “Save for Future Sessions” button.

Alternately, you can add this to your .emacs file:

 (setq auto-coding-alist
   (cons '("\\.arc\\'" . utf-8) auto-coding-alist))

thanks

My thanks to Adlai for help with this hack!