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 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.
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 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.