Emacs Charsets

Use (nth 2 (charset-priority-list)) to access the 3rd highest priority charset.

These charsets have properties such as (get-charset-property (nth 2 (charset-priority-list)) :code-space) [0 255 0 255 0 16 0 0] that are used in list-charset-chars to display a charset as a buffer. define-charset has documentation for these properties.

There is also describe-charset and read-charsetfor interactive purposes. This effectively uses intern under the hood, e.g. (list-charset-chars (intern "ascii"))

Here we see the different representations of ㄲ and how to encode/decode between Emacs’ code-point representation (Unicode) and a particular charset (Korean-ksc5601).

(let* ((char ?ㄲ)
       (hex-str (format "%X" char))
       (kr-charset (intern "korean-ksc5601"))
       (char-kr (encode-char char kr-charset))
       (hex-str-kr (format "%X" char-kr)))
  (when (= (decode-char kr-charset char-kr) char)
    `(("Charset" "Decimal" "Hex")
      (Unicode ,char ,hex-str)
      (Korean-ksc5601 ,char-kr ,hex-str-kr))))

Charset	Decimal	Hex
Unicode	12594	3132
Korean-ksc5601	9250	2422