Mulgara

The SPARQL Protocol definition says that for the HTTP binding "the whttp:outputSerialization is application/sparql-results+xml with UTF-8 encoding, application/rdf+xml with
UTF-8 encoding." (Section 2.2) That's for XML results; I haven't found the equivalent requirement for JSON output, but for my application in any case full utf-8 support for json and xml is essential.

As a general matter (principle of least surprise), I think the expected behavior would be "encoding-in equals encoding-out", so if I populate a graph with utf-8 data, query results should be utf-8, no matter the output serialization. Alternatively, one could argue that the standard HTTP 1.1 Accept-Charset header should govern; since it is an HTTP binding, HTTP rules should apply.

The SPARQL Protocol definition doesn't explicitly address character encoding for the SOAP binding, but since SOAP is an HTTP protocol it should probably do utf-8 or honor the Accept-Charset header.