[bug-gnu-libiconv] MS-ANSI query

[Peter Flynn]

I'm writing an RSS feed from a LISTSERV list fed by internal (Exchange) 
mail. The messages could have any content transfer encoding (most are 
Base64 or quoted-printable, and are handled by mewdecode) and any 
charset, but in all cases the resulting text is passed through iconv to 
make it UTF-8.

This doesn't work for messages sent in the undistinguished "8BIT" which 
appears from examination to be Windows ANSI in all local cases so far 
(so I'm prepared to live with that assumption).

The management of the feed is done in a Bash shell script and gawk under 
RHEL5 and the resulting UTF-8 XML is passed to Cocoon for feed 
generation. In the gawk script, it passes the text through the pipeline

<stuff> | iconv -f <charset> -t utf8 >more stuff

For the 8BIT messages I have tried MS-ANSI but this fails: an example 
error message is

iconv: illegal input sequence at position 1

for an input stream where the second byte (pos 1) is 0xF3 (lowercase 
letter o with acute accent). Testing the other ANSI values for the -f 
parameter, I find:

ANSI_X3.4       same error message
ANSI_X3.4-1968  same error message
ANSI_X3.4-1986  same error message
ANSI_X3.110     no error but converts to UTF8 0xC3 0xB0 (lowercase eth)
ANSI_X3.110-1983 (same as ANSI_X3.110)

I'm not sufficiently familiar with the internals of ANSI 8-bit encodings 
to know if this is correct (and I therefore have something else 
undefined) or if it's a bug.

///Peter