Question

When i run a compile instruction from the shell/eshell/term in emacs , the names of the variables appear weird in the shell .

Here is a sample code (with some random error) and the output when I compile :

#include iostream
#include cstdlib


int main (void)
{
cscdsd ;//some random error 
return ;
}
//shell o/p:
g++ new.cc 
new.cc: In function â\200\230int main()â\200\231:
new.cc:7: error: â\200\230cscdsdâ\200\231 was not declared in this scope
new.cc:8: error: return-statement with no value, in function returning â\200\230intâ\200\231
~/codes $ 

What i have figured out is that \200\230 and \200\231 mean the start and end of a variable or function name .
Any ideas what this happens or how to get rid of it ?

Answer 1

\200 is an octal escape sequence. In hex, â\200\230 is E2 80 98, which is how U+2018 (LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) is encoded in UTF-8. Likewise, â\200\231 is U+2019 (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK). This is what happens when g++ emits UTF-8 and Emacs interprets it as ISO-8859-1.

You probably need to set default-process-coding-system to a different value. Try (in your ~/.emacs):

(setq default-process-coding-system '(utf-8-unix . utf-8-unix))

There are other ways to tell Emacs what coding system to expect. Read the documentation for the variables default-process-coding-system & process-coding-system-alist and the functions universal-coding-system-argument & set-buffer-process-coding-system.