[I18n-sig] Perhaps the locale should matter?

[Guido van Rossum]

> Starting with glibc 2.2, you can ask for the encoding name with
> 
>   #include <langinfo.h>
> 
>   encoding_string = nl_langinfo(CODESET);
> 
> as described on
> 
>   http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/langinfo.h.html
> 
> But are you really interested in the name of the encoding or not more in
> the already Unicode-converted string?

Yes, we're really interested in the encoding name for 8-bit strings,
because we already have our own decoders.  Remember that Python runs
on more than Linux systems and we can't incorporate GPL'ed code
because our license needs to be more liberal.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)