We are building message catalogs in utf-8, and we want all characters to be preserved in the strings returned by gettext. I.e., we do not want conversion to the locale code page (unless it, too, is utf-8). We are unable to set the locale to a utf-8 encoding on Windows. Using iconv to convert to utf-8 won't help, because characters will have been lost before that point. Is there a way to force gettext to return the utf-8 text in the message catalog without any encoding conversion? Using R2.8. We'll actually want this to work on all platforms. TIA. -Jon Peck