iconv_open(3) Linux Programmer's Manual iconv_open(3)
NAME
iconv_open - allocate descriptor for character set conversion
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 supported combina-
tions 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{850,866,1131},
Mac{Roman,CentralEurope,Iceland,Croatian,Romania}, Mac{Cyril-
lic,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
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 current LC_CTYPE locale
facet)
char, wchar_t
When configured with the option --enable-extra-encodings, it also pro-
vides 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
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 character cannot be represented in
the target character set, it can be approximated through one or several
characters that look similar to the original character.
When the string "//IGNORE" is appended to tocode, characters that can-
not be represented in the target character set will be silently dis-
carded.
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 modi-
fies 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 conversion descrip-
tor. 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 supported by the
implementation.
CONFORMING TO
POSIX:2001
SEE ALSO
iconv(3) iconvctl(3) iconv_close(3)
GNU October 23, 2011 iconv_open(3)
libiconv 1.15 - Generated Sat Feb 4 06:18:59 CST 2017