[Linux-disciples] vim "CONVERSION ERROR"

[Stephen R Laniel]

Every now and again, typically when I copy text from a
Microsoft Word document into vim, vim will say "CONVERSION
ERROR" in the modeline. I just realized today that if I look
carefully in the vim doc, I'll see an upside-down question
mark on characters that vim had a hard time converting. If I
fix those characters, the "CONVERSION ERROR" goes away.

My question is: can vim be made more helpful? Can it tell
me, "We have a conversion error on line 20," for instance?

Here's the relevant documentation from vim.org:
http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/message.html

CONVERSION ERROR

When writing a file and the text "CONVERSION ERROR" appears, this means that some bits were lost when converting text from the internally used UTF-8 to the format of the file.  The file will not be marked unmodified.  If you care about the loss of information, set the 'fileencoding' option to another value that can handle the characters in the buffer and write again.  If you don't care, you can abandon the buffer or reset the 'modified' option.
-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/