libiconv

Description

For historical reasons, international text is often encoded using a language or country dependent character encoding. With the advent of the internet and the frequent exchange of text across countries - even the viewing of a web page from a foreign country is a "text exchange" in this context -, conversions between these encodings have become important. They have also become a problem, because many characters which are present in one encoding are absent in many other encodings. To solve this mess, the Unicode encoding has been created. It is a super-encoding of all others and is therefore the default encoding for new text formats like XML.

Still, many computers still operate in locale with a traditional (limited) character encoding. Some programs, like mailers and web browsers, must be able to convert between a given text encoding and the user's encoding. Other programs internally store strings in Unicode, to facilitate internal processing, and need to convert between internal string representation (Unicode) and external string representation (a traditional encoding) when they are doing I/O. GNU libiconv is a conversion library for both kinds of applications.

This library provides an iconv() implementation, for use on systems which don't have one, or whose implementation cannot convert from/to Unicode. It provides support for these encodings:

European languages - ASCII, ISO-8859-{1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,13,14,15,16}, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, CP{1250,1251,1252,1253,1254,1257}, CP{850,866,1131}, Mac{Roman,CentralEurope,Iceland,Croatian,Romania}, Mac{Cyrillic,Ukraine,Greek,Turkish}, Macintosh Semitic languages - ISO-8859-{6,8}, CP{1255,1256}, CP862, Mac{Hebrew,Arabic} Japanese - EUC-JP, SHIFT_JIS, CP932, ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-JP-2, ISO-2022-JP-1 Chinese - EUC-CN, HZ, GBK, CP936, GB18030, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950, BIG5-HKSCS, BIG5-HKSCS:2004, BIG5-HKSCS:2001, BIG5-HKSCS:1999, ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-EXT Korean - EUC-KR, CP949, ISO-2022-KR, JOHAB Armenian - ARMSCII-8 Georgian - Georgian-Academy, Georgian-PS Tajik - KOI8-T Kazakh - PT154, RK1048 Thai - ISO-8859-11, TIS-620, CP874, MacThai Laotian - MuleLao-1, CP1133 Vietnamese - VISCII, TCVN, CP1258 Platform specifics - HP-ROMAN8, NEXTSTEP Full Unicode - UTF-8 - UCS-2, UCS-2BE, UCS-2LE - UCS-4, UCS-4BE, UCS-4LE - UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE - UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE - UTF-7 - C99, JAVA Full Unicode, in terms of uint16_t or uint32_t (with machine dependent endianness and alignment) - UCS-2-INTERNAL, UCS-4-INTERNAL Locale dependent, in terms of 'char' or 'wchar_t' (with machine dependent endianness and alignment, and with OS and locale dependent semantics) - char, wchar_t - The empty encoding name "" is equivalent to "char": it denotes the locale dependent character encoding.

When configured with the option --enable-extra-encodings, it also provides support for a few extra encodings: European languages - CP{437,737,775,852,853,855,857,858,860,861,863,865,869,1125} Semitic languages - CP864 Japanese - EUC-JISX0213, Shift_JISX0213, ISO-2022-JP-3 Chinese - BIG5-2003 (experimental) Turkmen - TDS565 Platform specifics - ATARIST, RISCOS-LATIN1

It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode conversion. It has also some limited support for transliteration, i.e. when a character cannot be represented in the target character set, it can be approximated through one or several similarly looking characters. Transliteration is activated when "//TRANSLIT" is appended to the target encoding name.

libiconv is for you if your application needs to support multiple character encodings, but that support lacks from your system.