Unicode support in OGR

[magnus@…]

A function to return/set the encoding in a shapefiles .dbf is wanted. See URL
for an ESRI view of how it can be done. Alternatively/Also, the functions should
be able to support Unicode in all places where char * are used.

Background:
I'm working on qgis, and it uses Qt with QStrings. They are unicode, and when
using a non-unicode library one can chose between mystring.latin1(),
mystring.ascii(), mystring.utf8() msytring.unicode() and mystring.local8Bit()
for converting from unicode. So far, filenames use .local8Bit(), but attributes
use .ascii(). I'm thinking I might change it to .local(Bit() too.
The ideal(?) soultion would be if we could set the encoding to utf-8 for
instance, and also note that in the .dbf header somewhere. Reverse on reading.

References:
http://www.clicketyclick.dk/databases/xbase/format/dbf.html#DBF_STRUCT 
Discussion on irc #gdal 2005-07-06
Search "gdal org unicode" on google reveals discussion in gdal-dev on "Shapelib
and unicode".