ICONV_OPEN(3) Linux Programmer's Manual ICONV_OPEN(3)NAMEiconv_open - allocate descriptor for character set conver
sion
SYNOPSIS
#include <iconv.h>
iconv_t iconv_open (const char* tocode, const char* fromcode);
DESCRIPTION
The iconv_open function allocates a conversion descriptor
suitable for converting byte sequences from character
encoding fromcode to character encoding tocode.
The values permitted for fromcode and tocode and the sup
ported combinations are system dependent. For the libiconv
library, the following encodings are supported, in all
combinations.
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},
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, GB18030, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950,
BIG5-HKSCS, 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
Thai
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 semantics depending on the OS and the cur
rent LC_CTYPE locale facet)
char, wchar_t
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
Turkmen
TDS565
Platform specifics
RISCOS-LATIN1
The empty encoding name "" is equivalent to "char": it
denotes the locale dependent character encoding.
When the string "//TRANSLIT" is appended to tocode,
transliteration is activated. This means that when a char
acter cannot be represented in the target character set,
it can be approximated through one or several similarly
looking characters.
When the string "//IGNORE" is appended to tocode, charac
ters that cannot be represented in the target character
set will be silently discarded.
The resulting conversion descriptor can be used with iconv
any number of times. It remains valid until deallocated
using iconv_close.
A conversion descriptor contains a conversion state. After
creation using iconv_open, the state is in the initial
state. Using iconv modifies the descriptor's conversion
state. (This implies that a conversion descriptor can not
be used in multiple threads simultaneously.) To bring the
state back to the initial state, use iconv with NULL as
inbuf argument.
RETURN VALUE
The iconv_open function returns a freshly allocated con
version descriptor. In case of error, it sets errno and
returns (iconv_t)(-1).
ERRORS
The following error can occur, among others:
EINVAL The conversion from fromcode to tocode is not sup
ported by the implementation.
CONFORMING TO
UNIX98
SEE ALSOiconv(3), iconv_close(3)GNU May 26, 2002 ICONV_OPEN(3)
