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 char-
acter encoding tocode.
The values permitted for fromcode and tocode and the supported 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 current 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 character 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, characters that cannot 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 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 supported by the implementation.
CONFORMING TO
UNIX98
SEE ALSO
iconv(3), iconv_close(3)
GNU
May 26, 2002 ICONV_OPEN(3)