Decoding windows-1252 bytes to UTF-8 string
No binary dependency

decode1252(a::Vector{UInt8})

Convert an array of bytes a representing text in encoding cp1252/windows-1252 to a string.

• [0x8d] => '\u8d' as Windows API does
• no invalid sequence error
• non-blocking

julia> decode1252([0x80])
"€"

julia> decode1252([0xa9])
"©"

decode950(a::Vector{UInt8})

Convert an array of bytes a representing text in encoding cp950/big5/hkscs to a string.

• fallback to big5-hkscs or '\ufffd';no invalid sequence error
• non-blocking

julia> decode950([0xa4,0x48])
"人"

iconv is popular and ususally pre-installed on linux systems.However , it has several drawbacks

• older version produce inconsistent result , you have to installed latest iconv by your-self . Or simplily remove it because iconv based package will install one if not found
• it is slow in some circumstance
• it will crash the program while decoding if exception was not captured by the program
• it blocked the coroutine and this is bad in some application such as web service
• it is not 100% compatible with Windows API result. For example,in cp1252/windows-1252 [0x8d] throw error while it is supposed to be 'u8d'. Many web pages in latin-1 charset is actually encoded with codepage 1252 instead of latin-1. And in unknown charset , it should fallback to codepage 1252 as well.

Cp950 is popular and ususally the default charset of traditional Han character in east asia/taiwan. However , the iconv support is limited. Cp950 and hkscs were superset of big5 but hkscs was not compatible with cp950.

• older version iconv cannot decode big5-hkscs. And several web page in charset of big5 was actually encoded with big5-hkscs
• many web page in charset of big5 was actually encoded with cp950
• It is possible that web page in charset of big5 was actually mixed cp950 and hkscs . But hkscs is not compatible with cp950. For example, euro sign was in cp950 but not in hkscs; therefore , it will trigger exception if mixed cp950/hkscs encoding in iconv based method
• at this time point (2021/Apr) ,no package can decode mixed cp950/hkscs