/**
     * Set locale in a platform-independent way
     * @param  string $locale  the locale name ('en_US', 'uk_UA', 'fr_FR' etc)
     * @return  string  the encoding name used by locale-aware functions
     * @throw  Exception  if the locale could not be set
     */
    function setLocaleCP($locale) {
      list($lang, $cty) = explode('_', $locale);
      $locales = array($locale . '.UTF-8', $lang);
      $result = setlocale(LC_ALL, $locales);

      if(!$result) {
        throw new Exception("Unknown Locale name $locale");
      }

      // See if we have successfully set it to UTF-8
      if(!strpos($result, 'UTF-8')) {
        preg_match('~\.(\d+)$~', $result, $m);
        $encoding = 'CP' . $m[1];
      } else {
        $encoding = 'UTF-8';
      }

      return $encoding;
    }