Sources Bugzilla – Bug 3901
iconv -f emacs-mule
Last modified: 2007-02-17 07:17:09 UTC
From debian bug #398270 It would be very helpful if one could do $ iconv -f emacs-mule -t utf8 file as one way or another, an emacs buffer sometimes gets saved in mule encoding -- one cannot guarantee it will never happen, and the person later who discovers the file has been saved that way might not have, be able to use, or understand the documents of emacs. One would like to not need a Ph. D. to turn =98=A8=BB=98=BC=E2 back into =E5=8F=B0=E6=8E=83. Actually one way of rescuing the file would be to put -*-Coding: emacs-mule-*- at the top, possibly with ed(1), before opening it with emacs. Actually emacs should auto-detect the coding system, but sometimes there is a byte of garbage so emacs guesses wrong. Then one can copy and paste the region into a already open other utf-8 file, unless one understands the mule menus. Anyway, it would still be good to have it in iconv.
iconv is not a catch-all for encodings. This is what recode is for and recode already has mule support.