The demand to read a file (in local encoding) and to decode it incrementally seems a typical one.
With Gnulib, this can be done using the mbfile module to read in the multibytes byte-by-byte and then using the striconveh module to decode the multibytes in, say, UTF-8 or UTF-32. This, however, doesn't seem to be very efficient because the multibytes have to be investigated at least twice; once by the mbfile iterator and once by the striconveh iterator. Thus, I am wondering whether it makes sense to offer a stateful decoder that takes byte by byte and signals as soon as a decoded byte sequence is ready. On top of that, a decoding Unicode mbfile interface can be built, say ucfile. Thanks, Marc
