Hello, There's a bug released for a long time. XEmacs 21.4.9 returns t, but XEmacs 21.5-b9 returns nil for the following expression. (let ((str (char-to-string (make-char 'japanese-jisx0208 36 34)))) (string-equal (decode-coding-string (encode-coding-string str 'euc-japan) 'undecided) str)) In other words, XEmacs 21.5-b9 doesn't do the automatic decoding for Japanese text. It doesn't work not only for euc-japan but also for shift_jis etc. Probably it relates to this, find-file treats Japanese text as raw-text. Though I don't have an ability to fix it, I am anxious for this problem being solved in the future. Regards, -- Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka(a)jpl.org&gt;