gtk-charset questions

[rk-list koebler com]

hi,

I've got a few questions about which charset gtk uses.
i.e. string = entry.get_text() returns a string, and I would like
to know the charset of the string:

- which charset does "string" use?
  is this locale-dependent?
  does it also depend on something else?

- is this the same in C/gtk and python/pygtk?

- I've tested this with pygtk, and I always got UTF-8-encoded
  strings, no matter what locale I used (I tested: LANG=C,
  LANG=de_DE.iso88591 and LANG=en_US.utf8).
  can I rely on this? so does get_text() in pygtk always
  return utf-8-strings?

unfortunately I didn't find anything about this in the documentation,
so I hope you can help me.

TIA,
Roland