Converts between UTF-8 and many 7-bit ASCII equivalents and back.
This package provides conversion in both directions between UTF-8 Unicode and more than thirty 7-bit ASCII equivalents, including RFC 2396 URI format and RFC 2045 Quoted Printable format, the representations used in HTML, SGML, XML, OOXML, the Unicode standard, Rich Text Format, POSIX portable charmaps, POSIX locale specifications, and Apache log files, and the escapes used for including Unicode in Ada, C, Common Lisp, Java, Pascal, Perl, Postscript, Python, Scheme, and Tcl.
Such ASCII equivalents are useful when including Unicode text in program source, when debugging, and when entering text into web programs that can handle the Unicode character set but are not 8-bit safe. For example, MovableType, the blog software, truncates posts as soon as it encounters a byte with the high bit set. However, if Unicode is entered in the form of HTML numeric character entities, Movable Type will not garble the post.
It also provides ways of converting non-ASCII characters to similar ASCII characters, e.g. by stripping diacritics.