Feb. 10, 2012
9:50 a.m.
As And pointed out, this is already the behaviour of the "mbcs" codec under Windows. "locale" would be the moral (*) equivalent of that under Unix.
Indeed, and that precedent should be enough reason *not* to include a "locale" encoding. The "mbcs" encoding has caused much user confusion over the years, and it is less useful than people typically think. For example, for some time, people thought that names in zip files ought to be encoded in "mbcs", only to find out that this is incorrect years later. With a "locale" encoding, the risk for confusion and untestable code is too high (just consider the ongoing saga of the Turkish dotless i (ı)). Regards, Martin