Re: Displaying characters in user's locale

[Karl Berry]

    To work the iconv module needs to be added from gnulib.

I'll do that after the paperwork has gone through.
(And after Sergey has had a chance to review in detail.)

    * Default encoding is set as UTF-8 - decide whether this is desired

That would defeat the whole purpose, it seems to me.  Certainly it would
make the output for me be unusable.

All I can think of to base the default on the current locale, because
that's the only information we've got about what the user desires.
E.g., if the locale is "C" (or, equivalently, "POSIX", of course), the
target should be plain 7-bit ASCII.  If the locale is *.UTF-8, then the
target should be UTF-8.  Etc.  (I don't know all the locale names used
in this context, and can't find anything that seems like a comprehensive
list, although it must be out there somewhere.)

thanks,
karl