Hey mark!

 ml> see what i mean about no character set control line?

I fail to see your point.  If you cannot readily see that those are Danish
characters then obviously you shouldn't be converting them since they cannot be
converted to CP437 which is what CHRS kludge you are currently flying for some
reason.  If they were 8 bit characters, such as latin1, then they would require
conversion which of course you cannot do since those characters don't exist in
CP437.  Thus putting a CHRS kludge for utf-8 is a total waste of bytes seeing
that it will never work, especially given the total lack of understanding
within the FTSC of how things REALLY work, nevermind on how they should or
shouldn't be implimented.

 ml> without it there's no way for any system to know what character
 ml> set to use and whether or not to convert it to another...

Don't bother converting and everything will be just fine.  Conversion of utf-8
characters to an impossible 8 bit character set is an exersize in futility and
just ends up annoying those who don't require any dumbass, corrupt FTN control
line to see the obvious and deal with it properly.

Life is good,
Maurice

... Don't cry for me I have vi.
--- GNU bash, version 4.4.12(1)-release (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)