Conversion Error

[Robert Solomon]

I often copy-paste from a browser into a text file to save the content I come across.  When I try to save the file, I often get a conversion error.  I have to manually go thru each error and change the extended character to an ascii one.

I don't understand why this happens.  Any file I see is saved on a server, so why can't vim also save that file? 

And, what do I do to automatically save the file?

Thx,

Rob

[Robert Solomon]

I forgot to add that this is on a Windows 10 computer running gvim 8.2 w/ patches including 3049.

[Eike Rathke]

Hi Robert,

On Sunday, 2021-07-18 06:18:36 -0700, Robert Solomon wrote:

> I often copy-paste from a browser into a text file to save the content I
> come across. When I try to save the file, I often get a conversion error.
> I have to manually go thru each error and change the extended character to
> an ascii one.

Likely the text pasted from clipboard is in a different text encoding
(usually UTF-16 on Windows) than the file is saved in, and the file's
text encoding can't represent all characters. Issue the command

:set fenc?

that displays the current fileencoding. To be on the safe side choose an
encoding that can represent all Unicode characters, common is UTF-8.

So,

:set fileencoding=utf-8

before saving.

Best have encoding (taken from current locale) and fileencoding aligned
set to utf-8, but things may be more complicated on Windows. See
https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Working_with_Unicode and the help sections
it references.

Eike

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[rob]

> Hi Robert,
>
> On Sunday, 2021-07-18 06:18:36 -0700, Robert Solomon wrote:
>
>> I often copy-paste from a browser into a text file to save the content I
>> come across. When I try to save the file, I often get a conversion error.
>> I have to manually go thru each error and change the extended character to
>> an ascii one.
> Likely the text pasted from clipboard is in a different text encoding
> (usually UTF-16 on Windows) than the file is saved in, and the file's
> text encoding can't represent all characters. Issue the command
>
> :set fenc?
>
> that displays the current fileencoding. To be on the safe side choose an
> encoding that can represent all Unicode characters, common is UTF-8.
>
> So,
>
> :set fileencoding=utf-8
>
> before saving.
>
> Best have encoding (taken from current locale) and fileencoding aligned
> set to utf-8, but things may be more complicated on Windows. See
> https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Working_with_Unicode and the help sections
> it references.
>
> Eike
>

Hi Eike,

I think that was it.  It seems that the fenc for my files is latin1. 
I'll add a line in my _vimrc to set fenc=utf-8

Thanks

--rob