Koen Holtman writes: > But skimming the UTF-8 specification, I gather that UTF-8 is an encoding > mechanism, not a character set. Well, no. UTF8 is an encoding of characters. It implies the character repertoire of ISO 10646. So it is a charset in MIME sense, including the specific character definitions of 10646. You cannot use UTF8 to encode Japanese X0208 for example. Keld