33.10 Coding Systems

When Emacs reads or writes a file, and when Emacs sends text to a subprocess or receives text from a subprocess, it normally performs character code conversion and end-of-line conversion as specified by a particular coding system.

How to define a coding system is an arcane matter, and is not documented here.

• Coding System Basics		Basic concepts.
• Encoding and I/O		How file I/O functions handle coding systems.
• Lisp and Coding Systems		Functions to operate on coding system names.
• User-Chosen Coding Systems		Asking the user to choose a coding system.
• Default Coding Systems		Controlling the default choices.
• Specifying Coding Systems		Requesting a particular coding system for a single file operation.
• Explicit Encoding		Encoding or decoding text without doing I/O.
• Terminal I/O Encoding		Use of encoding for terminal I/O.