Temporarily disable strict UTF-8 checking

Hello List,

After upgrading to 8.1 we've been having problems with input data
having invalid byte sequences.

There are some data that we need to input at the moment and it would
be helpful to *temporarily* disable this setting while our developers
try to sort out some filtering mechanism at the application level to
strip these invalid byte sequences.

Best regards,
Matt

--
Stand before it and there is no beginning.
Follow it and there is no end.
Stay with the ancient Tao,
Move with the present.