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 `'. (Both are installed through "make install".) To use it, simply #include 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 -------------- Bruno Haible