6.2.2.1 Coding Systems

Emacs has excellent Unicode support, including:

• transparently reading and writing between different coding systems,
• bidirectional right-to-left script support,
• keyboard input method switching, and more.

describe-coding-system (‘C-h C’)

To see the coding system in use for the current buffer. Emacs will display a lot of information, including all the coding systems associated with the buffer. For files, they are almost always set to the same coding system.

The modeline will also provide some information:

U:**-  helloworld.c       92% of 5k   ...

The first character, ‘U’, means the buffer helloworld.c has a multi-byte coding system.

If it said ‘1’, it would typically be part 1 of any number of ISO character encodings. The exact mnemonic will depend on which of the hundreds of supported coding systems you are using.