I am very sorry that it felt rude, that was not my intention at all and I apologise. I will choose my words more carefully in the future. I wasn't sure if the commit was in response to my email or not, considering that there are a lot of UTF-8 related changes in R nowadays. Gabor Csardi On 22/02/2022 09:53, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote: I just saw a commit accidentally that adds iconv() support for the c99 \u escapes, which might or might not be accidental: https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/f19b4ae7715eea1b18ef8368b4c2849a578ade07 Calling my work 'accidental' felt very rude. It is work in progress, not least as the test suite is unfinished. Part of that test is to ensure it does the same thing as GNU libiconv, where the name and idea came from.