[texdoc] Weird behavior of `texdoc'

[Karl Berry]

    LESSCHARSET=utf-8 texlua test.lua

Thanks Paulo.

So I guess what could be useful is a tweak to texdoc to set
  env LESSCHARSET=utf-8 <pager>
if the current locale contains "UTF-8". Oh, except that won't work on
Windows (no env program). Maybe use putenv, if that's portable in Lua.
You get the idea ...

This is already supposed to be the default, according to the man page:

       If neither LESSCHARSET nor LESSCHARDEF is set, but any of the strings
       "UTF-8", "UTF8", "utf-8" or "utf8" is found in the LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE or
       LANG environment variables, then the default character set is utf-8.

but evidently something is going awry somewhere ... -k