Verify and merge any PRs from the original repo that are reasonable enhancements

[jimmybot]

After the project was abandoned, several PRs were opened that may be reasonable to merge: https://github.com/Rob-bie/retrieval/pulls

As we're publishing a new version of the package, may be worth including these

[adamark]

Update: Of the currently open PR's on retrieval, I migrated and merged 2 of them.

The last outstanding one Added compatibility of utf8 for the work of other languages. feels more like 3 different PR's as it introduces 2 new features and adds support for utf8 as its title states. All 3 of these seem valuable (most importantly utf8 support) but locally I ran into some issues.

My plan is to split apart the changes in that PR to isolate the issue. It's not a huge task but proved harder than the 1st 2 PR's.
I'm not sure if I see this as a requirement for publishing to hex. What do you think?

[jimmybot]

Yeah we can publish and revisit utf-8 support after