DCMTK

This feature request should mainly apply to DICOMDIR objects/files, where the SpecificCharacterSet attribute is contained in each individual DirectoryRecord (item). But please, don't introduce another ugly OFGlobal variable ...

Hm, why not make it possible to skip any conversion errors (if desired) and convert as much as possible, also in a normal dataset and not only in DICOMDIR? However, in DICOMDIR the issue is most obvious, and was the original reason for the request.

I don't think that a half-converted DICOM dataset is what would be desired by any DCMTK user. Please remember that the SpecificCharacterSet specifies the character set for the entire dataset! With the exception of a DICOMDIR, of course.

Please also note that a conversion usually does not fail if the converter is configured appropriately and the input dataset is encoded correctly. There are also "nice" conversion options when mapping characters to a character set with less items ...

As far as I understood, you mentioned that the DICOMDIR is a special case since you can ignore certain record (e.g. during import) if conversion fails.

Anyway, IMHO, the return code should warn the user if the conversion could not be completed successfully.