There is code above these lines, just before the start of the switch(), that validates that curitem->name is utf8. So we don't need to bother with oscar_utf8_try_convert() here. I know there has been some concern in the past about some people having non-utf8 names in their server list and wanting Pidgin to deal with that intelligently... all I can say is this commit shouldn't change the current functionality. It looks like we currently ignore groups from the server list if they're non-utf8, and it looks like it's been that way since at least 2.7.3, and more likely before then.