1 .\" Copyright (c) Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>
3 .\" This is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or
4 .\" modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
5 .\" published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of
6 .\" the License, or (at your option) any later version.
8 .\" References consulted:
9 .\" GNU glibc-2 source code and manual
10 .\" OpenGroup's Single Unix specification http://www.UNIX-systems.org/online.html
12 .TH ICONV_OPEN 3 "May 26, 2002" "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
14 iconv_open \- allocate descriptor for character set conversion
19 .BI "iconv_t iconv_open (const char* " tocode ", const char* " fromcode );
22 The \fBiconv_open\fP function allocates a conversion descriptor suitable
23 for converting byte sequences from character encoding \fIfromcode\fP to
24 character encoding \fItocode\fP.
26 The values permitted for \fIfromcode\fP and \fItocode\fP and the supported
27 combinations are system dependent. For the libiconv library, the following
28 encodings are supported, in all combinations.
33 ASCII, ISO-8859-{1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,13,14,15,16},
34 KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU,
35 CP{1250,1251,1252,1253,1254,1257}, CP{850,866},
36 Mac{Roman,CentralEurope,Iceland,Croatian,Romania},
37 Mac{Cyrillic,Ukraine,Greek,Turkish},
43 ISO-8859-{6,8}, CP{1255,1256}, CP862, Mac{Hebrew,Arabic}
48 EUC-JP, SHIFT_JIS, CP932, ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-JP-2, ISO-2022-JP-1
53 EUC-CN, HZ, GBK, GB18030, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950, BIG5-HKSCS,
54 ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-EXT
59 EUC-KR, CP949, ISO-2022-KR, JOHAB
69 Georgian-Academy, Georgian-PS
79 TIS-620, CP874, MacThai
102 UCS-2, UCS-2BE, UCS-2LE
105 UCS-4, UCS-4BE, UCS-4LE
108 UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE
111 UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE
119 Full Unicode, in terms of \fBuint16_t\fP or \fBuint32_t\fP
120 (with machine dependent endianness and alignment)
123 UCS-2-INTERNAL, UCS-4-INTERNAL
125 Locale dependent, in terms of \fBchar\fP or \fBwchar_t\fP
126 (with machine dependent endianness and alignment, and with semantics
127 depending on the OS and the current LC_CTYPE locale facet)
132 When configured with the option \fB\-\-enable-extra-encodings\fP, it also
133 provides support for a few extra encodings:
137 CP{437,737,775,852,853,855,857,858,860,861,863,865,869,1125}
148 EUC-JISX0213, Shift_JISX0213, ISO-2022-JP-3
160 The empty encoding name "" is equivalent to "char": it denotes the
161 locale dependent character encoding.
163 When the string "//TRANSLIT" is appended to \fItocode\fP, transliteration
164 is activated. This means that when a character cannot be represented in the
165 target character set, it can be approximated through one or several
166 similarly looking characters.
168 When the string "//IGNORE" is appended to \fItocode\fP, characters that
169 cannot be represented in the target character set will be silently discarded.
171 The resulting conversion descriptor can be used with \fBiconv\fP any number
172 of times. It remains valid until deallocated using \fBiconv_close\fP.
174 A conversion descriptor contains a conversion state. After creation using
175 \fBiconv_open\fP, the state is in the initial state. Using \fBiconv\fP
176 modifies the descriptor's conversion state. (This implies that a conversion
177 descriptor can not be used in multiple threads simultaneously.) To bring the
178 state back to the initial state, use \fBiconv\fP with NULL as \fIinbuf\fP
181 The \fBiconv_open\fP function returns a freshly allocated conversion
182 descriptor. In case of error, it sets \fBerrno\fP and returns (iconv_t)(-1).
184 The following error can occur, among others:
187 The conversion from \fIfromcode\fP to \fItocode\fP is not supported by the
192 .BR iconv "(3), " iconv_close (3)