Let's say that the preferred "destination data", regardless of it's original encoding, is supposed to be ISO-8859-1
Uhm, and how should that work? ISO-8859-1 has just 256 code points, including the control characters. Each of those code points have a specific meaning. There are many encodings that are used to encode data sets with more than 256 elements. What you want is impossible.

Of course, it's possible to use an encoding which uses nothing but characters from ISO-8859-1, or even printable ASCII. HTML numeric entities are one such an encoding. Or Perls \x{} escapes. You'd still need a mapping from numbers to meanings somewhere (perhaps you could borrow the Unicode mapping, but there are also encodings for scripts that use characters that are not defined in Unicode -- Klingon for instance)

In reply to Re: A definitive way to handle encoding/decoding problems? by JavaFan
in thread A definitive way to handle encoding/decoding problems? by DreamT

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