Resolve Wide character error

[opt9]

No description provided.

[glance-]

This patch does more than the short commit message describes, and it says nothing about what "Wide character error" it tries to fix.

This is a import of a old version from amazon + some of my and others patches. There are probably a newer release upstream.

Obviously others find this code now and again so if you split that commit into logical chunks and write good commit messages describing what they are actually doing, i'd take them.