Is there a standard encoding for NEEDED entries in ELF?

Question

I'm trying to make some of my code a bit more friendly to non-pure-ascii systems and was wondering if there was a particular character encoding used for NEEDED entries in ELF binaries, or is it rather unstandard and based on the creating system's filesystem encoding (or even just directly the bytes that were passed to whatever created the binary) (if so is there any place in the binary that specifies the encoding? assuming the current systems encoding wouldn't work very well for my usage I think), are non-ascii names pretty much banned or something else?

Answer 1

As far as I know, the standard Unix way of dealing with non-ASCII characters is to encode them as UTF-8.

Answer 2

ELF format specifies NEEDED fields as "null-terminated string" and does not say more about the encoding, which pretty much implies 8-bit ASCII string.

I personally don't see any point in complicating executable file format specification that does not provide any additional value for the final product or development process: the user won't see library names, so they wouldn't care about localization of thereof. You may try to use UTF-8, but actual file system encoding is not guaranteed to be UTF-8. To be sure you need to know how your target linker handles those strings.