1 GNU LIBICONV - character set conversion library
3 This library provides an iconv() implementation, for use on systems which
4 don't have one, or whose implementation cannot convert from/to Unicode.
6 It provides support for the encodings:
9 ASCII, ISO-8859-{1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,13,14,15,16},
10 KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU,
11 CP{1250,1251,1252,1253,1254,1257}, CP{850,866},
12 Mac{Roman,CentralEurope,Iceland,Croatian,Romania},
13 Mac{Cyrillic,Ukraine,Greek,Turkish},
16 ISO-8859-{6,8}, CP{1255,1256}, CP862, Mac{Hebrew,Arabic}
18 EUC-JP, SHIFT_JIS, CP932, ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-JP-2, ISO-2022-JP-1
20 EUC-CN, HZ, GBK, GB18030, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950, BIG5-HKSCS,
21 ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-EXT
23 EUC-KR, CP949, ISO-2022-KR, JOHAB
27 Georgian-Academy, Georgian-PS
31 TIS-620, CP874, MacThai
40 UCS-2, UCS-2BE, UCS-2LE
41 UCS-4, UCS-4BE, UCS-4LE
42 UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE
43 UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE
46 Full Unicode, in terms of `uint16_t' or `uint32_t'
47 (with machine dependent endianness and alignment)
48 UCS-2-INTERNAL, UCS-4-INTERNAL
49 Locale dependent, in terms of `char' or `wchar_t'
50 (with machine dependent endianness and alignment, and with OS and
51 locale dependent semantics)
53 The empty encoding name "" is equivalent to "char": it denotes the
54 locale dependent character encoding.
56 When configured with the option --enable-extra-encodings, it also provides
57 support for a few extra encodings:
60 CP{437,737,775,852,853,855,857,858,860,861,863,865,869,1125}
64 EUC-JISX0213, Shift_JISX0213, ISO-2022-JP-3
70 It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode
73 It has also some limited support for transliteration, i.e. when a character
74 cannot be represented in the target character set, it can be approximated
75 through one or several similarly looking characters. Transliteration is
76 activated when "//TRANSLIT" is appended to the target encoding name.
78 libiconv is for you if your application needs to support multiple character
79 encodings, but that support lacks from your system.
83 As usual for GNU packages:
85 $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
89 After installing GNU libiconv for the first time, it is recommended to
90 recompile and reinstall GNU gettext, so that it can take advantage of
93 On systems other than GNU/Linux, the iconv program will be internationalized
94 only if GNU gettext has been built and installed before GNU libiconv. This
95 means that the first time GNU libiconv is installed, we have a circular
96 dependency between the GNU libiconv and GNU gettext packages, which can be
97 resolved by building and installing either
98 - first libiconv, then gettext, then libiconv again,
99 or (on systems supporting shared libraries, excluding AIX)
100 - first gettext, then libiconv, then gettext again.
101 Recall that before building a package for the second time, you need to erase
102 the traces of the first build by running "make distclean".
104 This library can be built and installed in two variants:
106 - The library mode. This works on all systems, and uses a library
107 `libiconv.so' and a header file `<iconv.h>'. (Both are installed
108 through "make install".)
110 To use it, simply #include <iconv.h> and use the functions.
112 To use it in an autoconfiguring package:
113 - If you don't use automake, append m4/iconv.m4 to your aclocal.m4
115 - If you do use automake, add m4/iconv.m4 to your m4 macro repository.
116 - Add to the link command line of libraries and executables that use
117 the functions the placeholder @LIBICONV@ (or, if using libtool for
118 the link, @LTLIBICONV@). If you use automake, the right place for
119 these additions are the *_LDADD variables.
120 Note that 'iconv.m4' is also part of the GNU gettext package, which
121 installs it in /usr/local/share/aclocal/iconv.m4.
123 - The libc plug/override mode. This works on GNU/Linux, Solaris and OSF/1
124 systems only. It is a way to get good iconv support without having
126 It installs a library `libiconv_plug.so'. This library can be used with
127 LD_PRELOAD, to override the iconv* functions present in the C library.
129 On GNU/Linux and Solaris:
130 $ export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libiconv_plug.so
133 $ export _RLD_LIST=/usr/local/lib/libiconv_plug.so:DEFAULT
135 A program's source need not be modified, the program need not even be
136 recompiled. Just set the LD_PRELOAD environment variable, that's it!
140 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.9.2.tar.gz
143 http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/
146 <bug-gnu-libiconv@gnu.org>
149 Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>