Why do you remove "const char*" type on encoding: the type is correct, no?

I suspect that this is following Martin's comment on the issue.

Ok, but Martin's comment also says:

The text description should explain what encoding is, but it appears it may already do that well enough.

@erlend-aasland: Do you want to address this issue?

Sure, I can take care of that later today.

I believe the arguments are explained pretty good already:

This format requires two arguments. The first is only used as input, and
must be a :c:expr:const char* which points to the name of an encoding as a
NUL-terminated string, or NULL, in which case 'utf-8' encoding is used.
An exception is raised if the named encoding is not known to Python. The
second argument must be a :c:expr:char**; the value of the pointer it
references will be set to a buffer with the contents of the argument text.
The text will be encoded in the encoding specified by the first argument.

But, I find it strange that the type is removed. Passing a NULL argument to a const char * parameter is perfectly allowed in C.

Reading again the OP by Larry, I'm not so sure he meant the data types to be removed: #68168 (comment)

See also the description of the table at the top of arg.rst:

In the following description, the quoted form is the format
unit; the entry in (round) parentheses is the Python object type that matches
the format unit; and the entry in [square] brackets is the type of the C
variable(s) whose address should be passed.