Re: `read-from-minibuffer' seems to always return a multibyte string, but why?

Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> writes:

>> From: Nickolai Dobrynin <[email protected]>
>> Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2026 05:47:52 +0200
>> 
>> I ran M-x ielm, executed
>> 
>> (set-buffer-multibyte nil)
>> (read-from-minibuffer "Input: ")
>> 
>> and got a multibyte string back.
>
> Please show exactly what you did.  If I do this:
>
>  emacs -Q
>  M-: (set-buffer-multibyte nil) RET
>  M-: (multibyte-string-p (read-from-minibuffer "? " nil nil nil nil nil t)) RET
>
> and type "foo RET" at the prompt, I get nil as the result, as
> expected.

I evaluated the two forms above but did not use the -Q command line option.

I noticed that the final argument in your example is set to t. In my
example, it defaulted to nil.

Your example does work as expected.

>> By the way, a multibyte string was really what I wanted out of this. I
>> just want to be sure that this behavior is not accidental.
>
> Why do you care, may I ask?

I've been looking at `gnus-search-make-spec' in gnus-search.el and
asking myself what kind of string this function returns. The final
argument in the call to `read-from-minibuffer' defaults to nil. I must
have understood the meaning of that argument in reverse.


Many thanks.