Problem with file encoding

[senny]

Problem with file encoding

[root42]

When I manually set the coding-system to utf-8, the completion works.

[senny]

I think the problem is the following: Emacs transmits the encoding of the current buffer to eclim. Eclim uses that encoding in the Java-World to read the source file properly. Since Emacs know a wide array of encodings, which are not common because they have suffixes like "-unix" or "-dos" eclim does not understand the encoding.

I skimmed the emacs-eclim source and found the following variable:

(defvar eclim--file-coding-system-mapping
  '(("undecided-dos" . "iso-8859-1")
    ("dos" . "iso-8859-1")
    ("undecided-unix" . "iso-8859-1")
    ("utf-8-dos" . "utf-8")
    ("utf-8-unix" . "utf-8")
    ("utf-8-emacs-unix" . "utf-8")))

It looks like that variable performs the mapping of Emacs encodings into encodings eclim can understand. You should be fine if you add a mapping for your encoding:

(add-to-list 'eclim--file-coding-system-mapping '("iso-latin-1-unix" . "iso-8859-1"))

Since this is a common mistake people will run into it would be nice if you make a pull-request and add the mapping to the emacs-eclim source.

[root42]

Thanks, this works. Maybe there should be a "default" case, which maps to e.g. iso-8859-1 or utf-8 (which would probably work in a lot of cases), just like the undecided-unix case.

[senny]

@root42 I think there should be a better error message when things go wrong but I disagree with the default case. This would swallow error messages and just supply broken completions and features. It's much harder to debug such a situation where things just don't work compared to a straight-forward error-message.

@fred-o What do you think about catching this error and printing a message, which describes how to add new mappings to emacs-eclim?

[root42]

@senny Yes, I understand. A simple message stating that the coding is unknown to emacs-eclim would have been useful. Maybe you can make the mappings a customizable variable? Usually I just fire up customize when something goes wrong and see if I can turn some knobs to make it work.

[fred-o]

Something like this? 49ff122

[senny]

@fred-o exactly! closing this one.