Char Mapping Woes

[Richmond]

To quote from the LC Documentation:

"Use the macToISO function to translate data that was created on a Mac 
OS system to the Windows Latin 1 character set used on Unix and Windows 
systems."

and . . .

"Use the ISOToMac function to translate data that was created on a Unix 
or Windows system to the Mac OS character set."

All jolly clever and so on; but, ultimately, if we are to go completely, 
100% Unicode, rather useless.
These 2 functions switch back and forth between 2 non-Unicode char mappings.

What is needed, surely, is a VAST series of parsers that will convert 
all the myriad of non-Unicode mappings to Unicode.

At the risk of being boring I would refer you to this again: 
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

As Livecode is put together with C++ I would also like to refer you to this:

http://site.icu-project.org/

Which, if I understand things correctly, can "Convert text data to or 
from Unicode and nearly any other character set or encoding."

I wonder if that can be rolled into Livecode?

Richmond.