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(elisp)Loading Non-ASCII

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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 (Note: 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.  Note:
Coding Systems.

   To make the results more predictable, Emacs always performs decoding
into the multibyte representation when loading Lisp files, even if it
was started with the `--unibyte' option.  This means that string
constants with non-ASCII characters translate into multibyte strings.
The only exception is when a particular file specifies no decoding.

   The reason Emacs is designed this way is so that Lisp programs give
predictable results, regardless of how Emacs was started.  In addition,
this enables programs that depend on using multibyte text to work even
in a unibyte Emacs.  Of course, such programs should be designed to
notice whether the user prefers unibyte or multibyte text, by checking
`default-enable-multibyte-characters', and convert representations
appropriately.

   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 `-*-unibyte: t;-*-' in a comment on
the file's first line.  With that designator, the file will
unconditionally be interpreted as unibyte, even in an ordinary
multibyte Emacs session.  This can matter when making keybindings to
non-ASCII characters written as `?vLITERAL'.


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