Multiple char encodings for site internationalzation

Is there any move towards implementing support for more non-latin character sets in the works? (the iso 8859-X series and windows Code pages) I see the utf8_encode and decode as well as the convert_cyr_encoding functions, but what about middle eastern and asian languages such as arabic etc... http://www.whizkidtech.net/i18n/ references source for a library which claims to support many international encodings. A generic convert_encoding($from,$to,$text) function would be very helpful for me... For example: I am in charge of the technical aspects of translating a site into arabic, and need to serve users who are only capable of displaying one of 3 arabic encodings (windows code page 1256, iso 8859-6 or UTF-8) as well as those who do not have an arabic browser at all (dynamic gifs created with tt fonts). with such a function I would simply store my base data in UTF-8 form and convert it using the function based on the user selection or automatically based on thier user-agent. I don't feel proficient enough (my c skills are pretty weak) to write my own module, but it seems that with such a library already in existance it should be a simple task to write such a function.... Any ideas, have I missed where this functionality is already present in php? Alvin Engler