RE: String conversions UTF8 <-> ISO-8859-1

[Hallvard B Furuseth <h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no>]

Howard Chu writes:
>> I suggest ldap.conf could contain lines with
>>
>>    attr-charset <charset> [<attribute-name> <attribute-name>...]
>>    client-charset <charset>
>>
>> <charset> would normally be "unknown" alias "binary" or "UTF-8".  The
>> default attr-charset would be unknown, but an "attr-charset
>> UTF-8" line
>> without any attributes would set the default attr-charset to UTF-8.
>>
>> Then, all that remains is to implement this:-)
> 
> Given that utilities like iconv and such exist, I think this is best
> left as an exercise for the reader.

If by 'the reader' you mean 'the user', I don't like that.  If you mean
'the applicaton', I disagree just as strongly: It just leads to
American/English-written applications that don't bother to handle
character sets.  Like ldapsearch.  If the library offered character set
handling, then applications could easily get character set handling, and
they wouldn't all have to reinvent the wheel.  Besides, iconv is a
program, not a library.  What applications need is library support for
character set handling, not some program they must pipe all I/O through.

-- 
Hallvard