Why are some calls to htmlentities hard-coded to UTF-8?

[lat9]

I ran a Tools->Developers Tool Kit against my v1.5.1 catalog for htmlentities because I couldn't remember the format. In the result, I noticed that a couple of files (see below) have the third parameter hard-coded to UTF-8 instead of using CHARSET. What's the reason for this?

/includes/functions/functions_general.php
/includes/modules/payment/linkpoint_api.php
/includes/modules/payment/paypal/paypal_functions.php
/includes/modules/payment/paypaldp.php
/includes/modules/payment/paypalwpp.php

[DrByte]

I've not looked at the exact cases you mention, but based on the filenames, I suspect that the reason might be related to the possibility that the external services to which the data is being submitted might only accept utf8?