There's some code in commodity_t::parse_symbol(std::istream&, string&) (src/commodity.cc) for doing something special with non-ASCII UTF-8 characters. However, it doesn't seem to actually make any difference: it copies bytes into a buffer; but all bytes (except "invalid_chars") get copied into the buffer anyway. So this special code seems to be pointless.

Is there some subtlety I'm missing? If not, we might as well excise this useless code.