Building on this comment, it's actually surprisingly straightforward to add your own encodings into the core language. Just add the appropriate types and extend

Building on this comment, it's actually surprisingly straightforward to add your own encodings into the core language. Just add the appropriate types and extend the necessary base methods. In this case, it appears Julia 0.5 has a transcode method supporting UTF8/16/32. [1] 1: http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.5/stdlib/strings/ http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.5/stdlib/strings/