Libiconv

        GNU LIBICONV - character set conversion library

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
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.so' and 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.m4 to your aclocal.m4 file.
  • If you do use automake, add m4/iconv.m4 to 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 that 'iconv.m4' is also part of the GNU gettext package, which installs it in /usr/local/share/aclocal/iconv.m4.

• 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!

Copyright

The libiconv and libcharset libraries and their header files are under LGPL, see file COPYING.LIB.

The iconv program and the documentation are under GPL, see file COPYING.

Download

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.14.tar.gz

Homepage

http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/

Bug reports to

<bug-gnu-libiconv@gnu.org>

Bruno Haible bruno@clisp.org