Hi Artyom, I don't have time to answer in much detail, but I'll just re-emphasise that I would very much like to see a simple and fast character set conversion like this: string l1_name = charset_conv<utf8,latin1>(utf8_name); In my own charset conversion code, I generated a large enum of all the character set names and aliases based on the IANA registry (http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets). I then have a fallback converter using iconv, and fast specialisations for cases like utf-to/from-iso8859. I would happily contribute those specialisations if you had a way to plug them in. Currently you offer either conversion functions that take character set names as strings, which I dislike because of the overhead of the run-time lookup that is required (especially for short strings), and stream processing, which I dislike because I don't want the overhead (runtime and lines-of-code) of copying to and from stringstreams. Regards, Phil.