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},
Mac{Roman,CentralEurope,Iceland,Croatian,Romania},
Mac{Cyrillic,Ukraine,Greek,Turkish},
Macintosh
Semitic languages
ISO-8859-{6,8}, CP{1255,1256}, 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, BIG5HKSCS,
ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-EXT
Korean
EUC-KR, CP949, ISO-2022-KR, JOHAB
Armenian
ARMSCII-8
Georgian
Georgian-Academy, Georgian-PS
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-7
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
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
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.
- 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 `libiconv_plug.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/libiconv_plug.so
On OSF/1:
$ export _RLD_LIST=/usr/local/lib/libiconv_plug.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!
Distribution:
ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/libiconv-1.5.tar.gz
Homepage:
http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html
Bruno Haible <haible@clisp.cons.org>
