Character set conversion, locales, UTF-8, etc

[grarpamp]

>> As an aside, why does FreeBSD seem to default to the above locale
>> instead of say, en_US.UTF-8 ?
>
> FreeBSD's file system does not default to any locale, as far as I
> know. The system is "agnostic" to what the characters in the file
> name mean or what symbol they should represent.

Sure the fs is just binary, then viewed and written through
the mask of the selected langauge layer I think.

I think in my case some data was said to be in a particular
encoding when in fact it may have been in another, and then
pushed down to disk by the app through that wrong mask.

> There isn't much you can do on file system level except renaming
> the files: write a program that reads the file names according
> to the preferred interpretation and write new names for them,

I'll read more on language to see if I can reverse that and
recover them or just replace with X's.
I was looking mostly for a tool that would show me what a
filename or data looks like in hex, octal, and different
selected encodings. Doing it by hand is slow. I'll check
ports again.