[bug-gawk] feature request: iconv/recode dynamic extension

[Franta Hanzlík]

Hello,
not sure when it is good idea, but I think this may be usefull for
others also: I'm just doing some word processing in gawk, and it's
part is two string comparison. These strings are plaintext ASCII
strings obtained by removing diacritics from the original Latin-1
and Latin-2 strings - thus I need conversion as
 "äáéěóöščýíüúů" -> "aaeeooscyiuuu".
For now I solve this by calling external conversion program - as

iconv -f UTF-8 -t US-ASCII//TRANSLIT <<< "üöóäěščřžýáíéúů"
   or
recode -f u8..flat <<< "üöóäěščřžýáíéúů"

but for thousands strings it is too slow (and resource expensive).

There is perhaps lot of similar text conversions cases, where gawk
dynamic extension for this needs wil be very useful.

Eventually, when this idea isn't totally bad, I can try to program
it, but I have no programming skills - thus can You please give me
some advice on how to do this?
-- 
Thanks in advance, Franta Hanzlik