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Introduction| Get the Software
Introduction to libiconv
International text is mostly encoded inUnicode. For historical reasons, however, it is sometimes still 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 a necessity.
In particular, computers with the Windows operating system 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.
Details
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 the 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, ISO-2022-JP-MS
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.
Installation
As usual for GNU packages:
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local $ make $ make install
After installing GNU libiconv for the first time, it is recommended to recompile and reinstall GNU gettext, so that it can take advantage of libiconv.
On systems other than GNU/Linux, the iconv program will be internationalized only if GNU gettext has been built and installed before GNU libiconv. This means that the first time GNU libiconv is installed, we have a circular dependency between the GNU libiconv and GNU gettext packages, which can be resolved by building and installing either
- first libiconv, then gettext, then libiconv again, or (on systems supporting shared libraries, excluding AIX)
- first gettext, then libiconv, then gettext again. Recall that before building a package for the second time, you need to erase the traces of the first build by running "make distclean".
This library can be built and installed in two variants:
- The library mode. This works on all systems, and uses a library
libiconv.soand a header file<iconv.h>. (Both are installed through "make install".)
To use it, simply#include <iconv.h>and use the functions.
To use it in an autoconfiguring package:- If you don't use automake, append
m4/iconv.m4to youraclocal.m4file. - If you do use automake, add
m4/iconv.m4to your m4 macro repository. - Add to the link command line of libraries and executables that use the functions the placeholder
@LIBICONV@(or, if using libtool for the link,@LTLIBICONV@). If you use automake, the right place for these additions are the *_LDADD variables.
Note thaticonv.m4is also part of the GNU gettext package, which installs it in/usr/local/share/aclocal/iconv.m4.
- If you don't use automake, append
- The libc plug/override mode. This works on GNU/Linux, Solaris and OSF/1 systems only. It is a way to get good iconv support without having glibc-2.1. It installs a library
preloadable_libiconv.so. This library can be used with LD_PRELOAD, to override the iconv* functions present in the C library.- On GNU/Linux and Solaris:
$ export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/preloadable_libiconv.so - On OSF/1:
$ export _RLD_LIST=/usr/local/lib/preloadable_libiconv.so:DEFAULT
A program's source need not be modified, the program need not even be recompiled. Just set the LD_PRELOAD environment variable, that's it!
- On GNU/Linux and Solaris:
Copyright
The libiconv and libcharset libraries and their header files are under LGPL.
The iconv program is under GPL.
Downloading libiconv
libiconv can be downloaded from https://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.17.tar.gz. For other ways to obtain libiconv, please readHow to get GNU Software.
The latest development sources can be obtained through thesavannah project.
Documentation
Below are the links for the online documentation.
The iconv program
The library functions
iconv_open.3.html
iconv.3.html
iconv_close.3.html
iconvctl.3.html
iconv_open_into.3.html
Bug reports
Bug reports should be sent to <bug-gnu-libiconv-antispam@antispam.gnu.org>.
Return to GNU's home page.
Please send general FSF & GNU inquiries tognu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.
Please send broken links and other corrections or suggestions to<bug-gnu-libiconv-antispam@antispam.gnu.org>.
Copyright (C) 1998, 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
Last updated:$Date: 2022/05/15 20:38:31 $ Author:haibleAuthor: haible Author:haible