How to reset emacs to save files in utf-8-unix character encoding?

Question

I have a problem. I found out that emacs recently stopped to save all my new files with the default character set \"utf-8-unix\". I do not understand what

Answer 1

For some reason, Windows started interpreting my init.el file as being encoded in something other than UTF-8, and choked on characters such as "ö" and "§". The solution was to add a line ; -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the start of the file.

To make very sure that UTF-8 is used in every case, I have the following lines in init.el:

;; Use UTF-8 for all character encoding.
(set-language-environment 'utf-8)
(set-default-coding-systems 'utf-8)
(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-locale-environment "en.UTF-8")
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
(setq utf-translate-cjk-mode nil) ; disable CJK coding/encoding