: '''`[encoding] convertto`''' ?''encoding''? ''string''
** See Also **
[GSM 03.38 encoding]: Example of an encoding with "non-null" 0 character.
[ycl%|%ycl string encode]: An alternative that returns an error rather than losing information.
** Description **
Converts ''string'' from [Unicode] to the specified ''encoding''. The result
is a string where each character represents the next byte in the resulting byte
sequence. I.e., each byte is represented by the lower 8-bits of a Unicode
character.
If ''encoding'' is not specified, the current [encoding
system%|%system encoding] is used.
If a character in ''string'' can not be converted to ''encoding'', that character is replaced by a character that can. In other words, `encoding convertto` may lose information.
** Discussion **
[ZB]: ...and what then? How to convert such "byte array" into "ordinary string", which uses chosen ISO-encoding - can be [encoding system] - and which uses single-byte characters?)
[DKF]: Depends what you want to do really, yes? It's useful with [binary format]'s `a` and `A` conversions, and you can communicate it externally over channels that are using the `iso8859-1` encoding. Or that you [chan configure%|%configure] to be `-translation binary` or `-encoding binary`. To be clear, “byte arrays” ''are strings'' where the characters are all from the range `U+000000`–`U+0000FF`; they also happen to have a more efficient internal representation, but that's not very important, a fact that you should ignore.
[ZB] Is this a method (external communication over channels) used by msgcat-tools? No, I didn't analyse its code yet; I was just trying to use "convert" to perform conversions - according to its name - with no desired result.
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