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,

        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.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-1.15.tar.gz

Homepage

--------

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

Bug reports to

--------------

    <bug-gnu-libiconv@gnu.org>

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>