Interesting. At least the "39" makes sense. I don't understand the
documentation well enough to know what the "79" is about.

I'm sorry but I can't work out what I should do with:

  printf("Encoding is %x\n", enc);

Am I meant to use this in python, a standard shell or something else? I
tried in a bash shell and a python interpreter (after undoing my "work
around") and both gave errors - a syntax error in the case of bash; a
complaint about printf being unrecognised in python. I also tried
"import os, sys, locale" first just in case.

  bash: syntax error near unexpected token `"Encoding is %x\n",'

(python)
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  NameError: name 'printf' is not defined

Sorry for being dumb about this.