Re: Converting between UTF8 and local codepage without specifying local codepage

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 10:02:31AM -0500, David Schlegel wrote:
> That is helpful information. I have been spending time to determine the 
> local page by other means but have consistently been challenged that this 
> is the wrong approach and that Perl must know somehow. Getting a 
> definitive answer is almost as helpful as getting a better answer. 
> 
> Based on what you are saying, there is no way to ask Perl what the "local 
> codepage" is and hence there can be no variant of "Encode" which can be 
> told to convert from "local codepage" to UTF8 without having to provide 
> the "local codepage" value explicitly. 

Yes. A good summary of the situation.

> Is I18N::Langinfo(CODESET())  the best way to determine the local codepage 
> for Unix ? Windows seems to reliably include the codepage number in the 
> locale but Unix is all over the map.

I don't know. I have little to no experience of doing conversion of real
data, certainly for data outside of ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8, and I've never used
I18N::Langinfo. I hope that someone else on this list can give a decent
answer.

Nicholas Clark