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I am trying to configure Emacs to save UTF-8 files with a Byte Order Mark. (Yes, I know that the BOM is evil and unnecessary for UTF-8 files. However, Microsoft has decided they know better, so I want to make sure I'm able to save files with BOM.)

However, for some reason my choice of utf-8-with-signature for buffer-file-coding-system won't stick when I save the file.

I'm using Emacs 24.5.1 on Windows 10. To reproduce:

  1. emacs -Q
  2. Open a file (optionally one that already has a BOM).
  3. (setq buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8-with-signature) (Or M-x set-buffer-file-coding-system RET utf-8-with-signature RET.)
  4. C-x C-s
  5. C-h v buffer-file-coding-system. It is now set to utf-8-dos. I also verified that the existing BOM was removed from the file.

Why is this happening, and how can I fix it?

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Scott Weldon
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1 Answers1

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Pityingly I can only give an answer to the second question "How can I fix this".

Let emacs guess the file encoding after finding the file via html-mode-hook and use it for saving the file via save-buffer-coding-system. You can do that with the following lisp snippet in your init file.

(defun TZA-html-set-coding-system ()
  "Retain the byte order marker of `html-mode' buffers."
  (setq save-buffer-coding-system buffer-file-coding-system))

(add-hook 'html-mode-hook #'TZA-html-set-coding-system)
Tobias
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  • This seems like a useful workaround. I no longer do much development on Windows, so it might be a while before I can get around to testing it. – Scott Weldon Oct 20 '17 at 22:56
  • Is there a way to apply this to all buffers instead of just those with a given mode? – Scott Weldon Oct 20 '17 at 22:57
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    @ScottWeldon You can use `after-change-major-mode-hook` instead of `html-mode-hook`. But I think this is not necessary. From what I read about the problem it is special to `html-mode-hook`. Note, that it is not limited to Windows. – Tobias Oct 23 '17 at 15:24
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    Okay, thanks. IIRC, I wasn't using `html-mode` when I ran into this problem; I think it was `web-mode` and/or `csharp-mode`. – Scott Weldon Oct 23 '17 at 18:02