The recode program recognizes or produces approximately 150 character
sets and can convert almost any character set to almost any other.
When exact translations are not possible, the program may get rid of
offending characters or use approximations. Particular attention has
been paid to the proper representation of French language diacritics.

The original recode by pinard hasn't been updated in almost 10 years.
It seems most distros have moved to a well-maintained fork by
rrthomas and it's probably time we did too.

NOTE: We are unable to update past 3.7.13 due to Slackware 15.0's
autoconf being too old (2.69). recode-3.7.14+ requires autoconf 2.71+.