Hmm. Thank you.
Somehow these operations are converting an 8-bit character representaion to a multibyte (UTF-8) representation, for those values that are greater than 7F, and leaving the values alone when they fall within ASCII range. Probably it converts to Latin-1 since I think you would need a lookup table to convert to one of the other encodings.
I am still a little over my head here, but I am swimming upwards. What is the "&" doing here?
Thanks again