Common Lisp  implementations  may use a variety of character sets  that adhere to some rules.   This
complicates writing portable code that interacts with systems expecting a certain representation for
characters,  such as network services.   This library is intended  to be a reasonably  comprehensive
solution for making this easy.


The  COMMON-CHARACTER-SETS  library was created to serve my needs in anticipation of writing network
services and clients  in Common Lisp,  which generally demand ASCII or Unicode support.   I realized
code  I had for detecting ASCII support  could be separated,  improved,  and expanded upon for  this
purpose  and more.   This library  defines  no package  and merely  places keywords  in  *FEATURES*.

The only currently supported character set is ASCII,  which places :ASCII in  *FEATURES*.   The next
character set to be supported will be ISO-8859-1, with a keyword to be determined.

It is worth noting that Unicode encoding detection will either be unavailable or only available as a
hack  of sorts.   The intended Unicode keyword is  :UNICODE  and more keywords will be available for
different encodings thereof.

Written in 2019 by Prince Trippy.

This document is available under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.