Hi,

A while ago I developed a web app to replace an old cgi-bin script from the nineties, which means that it had to assume that POST requests with a Content-Type of application/x-www-urlencoded are in iso-8859-1 (and also support "smart quotes" etc., aka. windows-1252). At the same time it had to be possible to switch to utf-8 mode.

I accomplished that by adding support for a defaultCharset option, which can either be utf-8 or iso-8859-1, and for explicitly switching to utf-8 mode by adding utf8=%E2%9C%93 (utf8=✓ as percent-encoded utf-8 octets) to the query string, a trick that I've seen others use as well.

Here are the diffs between my forks of body-parser and the qs module:

master...papandreou:iso-8859-1
ljharb/qs@master...papandreou:interpretNumericEntities

Would anyone be interested in this work? If so, I can clean it up and open PRs.