From: ········@hex.net
Subject: Invalid Text Conversion
Date: 
Message-ID: <JF1P5.144660$bI6.5592167@news1.giganews.com>
"Valeriy E. Ushakov" <···@ptc.spbu.ru> writes:
> ········@hex.net wrote:
> > *** - invalid byte #x81 in CHARSET:ISO-8859-1 conversion
> > 1. Break NEWS[2]> where
> > 
> > EVAL frame for form (READ-LINE INS NIL 'EOF)
> > 
> > By looking at a backtrace, I can see that what it's "freaking at" is
> > that it's reading a line with a name that contains a "funny
> > international accent," which presumably isn't fitting well into
> > ISO-8859-1.
>
> Set either :EXTERNAL-FORMAT argument or LISP:*DEFAULT-FILE-ENCODING*
> to (make-encoding :charset CHARSET:CP1252 :line-terminator :DOS), or
> whatever is relevant in your case (no pun intended ;-).

That got me enough of the way to get to:
(setf LISP:*DEFAULT-FILE-ENCODING* 
     (lisp:make-encoding :charset CHARSET:CP1254 
                         :line-terminator :DOS 
                         :input-error-action :ignore))
which did the trick.

Perhaps better style would come in saving and restoring the default
file encoding, or in attaching it to the file open operation.  [On the
other hand, the above is fairly likely the action that I truly _want_,
across the board.]

Thanks very much.
-- 
(concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" ·@hex.net")
<http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/>
"When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that we do and they
don't." -- Alan Perlis