elisp: Loading Non-ASCII
15.4 Loading Non-ASCII Characters
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When Emacs Lisp programs contain string constants with non-ASCII
characters, these can be represented within Emacs either as unibyte
strings or as multibyte strings (
Text Representations). Which
representation is used depends on how the file is read into Emacs. If
it is read with decoding into multibyte representation, the text of the
Lisp program will be multibyte text, and its string constants will be
multibyte strings. If a file containing Latin-1 characters (for
example) is read without decoding, the text of the program will be
unibyte text, and its string constants will be unibyte strings.
Coding Systems.
In most Emacs Lisp programs, the fact that non-ASCII strings are
multibyte strings should not be noticeable, since inserting them in
unibyte buffers converts them to unibyte automatically. However, if
this does make a difference, you can force a particular Lisp file to be
interpreted as unibyte by writing ‘coding: raw-text’ in a local
variables section. With that designator, the file will unconditionally
be interpreted as unibyte. This can matter when making keybindings to
non-ASCII characters written as ‘?vLITERAL’.
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