Emacs and International Characters
Every now and then, I work on an application needs to read/write files that contain Unicode characters, even though everything I use is set to use UTF-8 encoding something gets messed up along the way. One of the first things I do is check the encoding Emacs uses on the buffer, to determine which one, Emacs or the application messed it up. Since I do this once in every 6 months or so, I tend to forget the commands. Following is a self reference of commands to mess with buffer encoding in Emacs.
To set which coding system to use during save/open,
C-x RET f (set-buffer-file-coding-system)
To ask emacs what it is doing with your files,
C-h C coding <RET>
If you want to make utf-8 as your default encoding for new files you can use,
(setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)