Cp1252 (windows western) is a superset of iso8859-1 (latin-1). accidentally mixing cp1252 with iso8859-1 is common, causing "gremlins" - broken misfit characters.

encode::zapcp1252 detects freak characters and either transliterates them into ascii counterparts or translates them to utf-8 equivalents.

processed strings are assumed to contain a mixture of ascii, iso8859-1 and cp1252, but no actual utf-8 characters (even if encoded as such). for string soups including utf-8 characters, encoding::fixlatin may be better suitable.