Provides an adapter layer between core routines for converting to and from UTF8 and other encodings. In essence, a way to give multiple existing Unicode modules a single common interface so you don't have to know the underlying implementations to do simple UTF8 to-from other character set encoding conversions. As such, it wraps the Unicode::String, Unicode::Map8, Unicode::Map and Jcode modules in a standardized and simple API. This also provides general character set conversion operation based on UTF8 - it is possible to convert between any two compatible and supported character sets via a simple two step chaining of conversions. As with most things Perlish - if you give it a few big chunks of text to chew on instead of lots of small ones it will handle many more characters per second. By design, it can be easily extended to encompass any new charset encoding conversion modules that arrive on the scene.