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, CP936, GB18030, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950, BIG5-HKSCS,
21 BIG5-HKSCS:2001, BIG5-HKSCS:1999, ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-EXT
23 EUC-KR, CP949, ISO-2022-KR, JOHAB
27 Georgian-Academy, Georgian-PS
33 ISO-8859-11, TIS-620, CP874, MacThai
42 UCS-2, UCS-2BE, UCS-2LE
43 UCS-4, UCS-4BE, UCS-4LE
44 UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE
45 UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE
48 Full Unicode, in terms of `uint16_t' or `uint32_t'
49 (with machine dependent endianness and alignment)
50 UCS-2-INTERNAL, UCS-4-INTERNAL
51 Locale dependent, in terms of `char' or `wchar_t'
52 (with machine dependent endianness and alignment, and with OS and
53 locale dependent semantics)
55 The empty encoding name "" is equivalent to "char": it denotes the
56 locale dependent character encoding.
58 When configured with the option --enable-extra-encodings, it also provides
59 support for a few extra encodings:
62 CP{437,737,775,852,853,855,857,858,860,861,863,865,869,1125}
66 EUC-JISX0213, Shift_JISX0213, ISO-2022-JP-3
68 BIG5-2003 (experimental)
72 ATARIST, RISCOS-LATIN1
74 It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode
77 It has also some limited support for transliteration, i.e. when a character
78 cannot be represented in the target character set, it can be approximated
79 through one or several similarly looking characters. Transliteration is
80 activated when "//TRANSLIT" is appended to the target encoding name.
82 libiconv is for you if your application needs to support multiple character
83 encodings, but that support lacks from your system.
87 As usual for GNU packages:
89 $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
93 After installing GNU libiconv for the first time, it is recommended to
94 recompile and reinstall GNU gettext, so that it can take advantage of
97 On systems other than GNU/Linux, the iconv program will be internationalized
98 only if GNU gettext has been built and installed before GNU libiconv. This
99 means that the first time GNU libiconv is installed, we have a circular
100 dependency between the GNU libiconv and GNU gettext packages, which can be
101 resolved by building and installing either
102 - first libiconv, then gettext, then libiconv again,
103 or (on systems supporting shared libraries, excluding AIX)
104 - first gettext, then libiconv, then gettext again.
105 Recall that before building a package for the second time, you need to erase
106 the traces of the first build by running "make distclean".
108 This library can be built and installed in two variants:
110 - The library mode. This works on all systems, and uses a library
111 `libiconv.so' and a header file `<iconv.h>'. (Both are installed
112 through "make install".)
114 To use it, simply #include <iconv.h> and use the functions.
116 To use it in an autoconfiguring package:
117 - If you don't use automake, append m4/iconv.m4 to your aclocal.m4
119 - If you do use automake, add m4/iconv.m4 to your m4 macro repository.
120 - Add to the link command line of libraries and executables that use
121 the functions the placeholder @LIBICONV@ (or, if using libtool for
122 the link, @LTLIBICONV@). If you use automake, the right place for
123 these additions are the *_LDADD variables.
124 Note that 'iconv.m4' is also part of the GNU gettext package, which
125 installs it in /usr/local/share/aclocal/iconv.m4.
127 - The libc plug/override mode. This works on GNU/Linux, Solaris and OSF/1
128 systems only. It is a way to get good iconv support without having
130 It installs a library `preloadable_libiconv.so'. This library can be used
131 with LD_PRELOAD, to override the iconv* functions present in the C library.
133 On GNU/Linux and Solaris:
134 $ export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/preloadable_libiconv.so
137 $ export _RLD_LIST=/usr/local/lib/preloadable_libiconv.so:DEFAULT
139 A program's source need not be modified, the program need not even be
140 recompiled. Just set the LD_PRELOAD environment variable, that's it!
144 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.11.1.tar.gz
147 http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/
150 <bug-gnu-libiconv@gnu.org>
153 Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>