This is an official tiny wrapper library that helps you forget about UTF-8 conversions in the new CS2D versions. The library replaces the msg, msg2, print and parse functions to always use UTF-8. The library has a safeguard against being loaded multiple times, so it should be safe to include in your mod or script without additional considerations.

When using this library for UTF-8 strings in your code, make sure to save your .lua files as UTF-8 without BOM!

In case you need raw access to UTF-8 helper functions, the library provides the following:

utf8.codepoint(char) [number] - get the Unicode codepoint of the given character.
utf8.encode(char) [string] - get the UTF-8 representation of a single character.
utf8.convert(str) [string] - get a CS2D-ready UTF-8 representation of the given string.

After loading this library, UTF-8 conversion works as follows:

utf8.convert("欢迎来到CS2D") gives
utf8.convert("Привет CS2D!") gives

Good work. But why don't you use a standard Lua way of making a module? I.E. No global declarations and one return. If you do it that way, then there's no reason to implement a safeguard, as "require" function already has a safeguard implemented.

This deserves a like.