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 combinations are system-dependent.  For the GNU  C  library,  the  permitted
       values  are listed by the iconv --list command, and all combinations of the listed values are supported.  Furthermore the GNU C library and
       the GNU libiconv library support the following two suffixes:

       //TRANSLIT
	      When the string "//TRANSLIT" is appended to tocode, transliteration is activated.  This means that when a character cannot be repre-
	      sented in the target character set, it can be approximated through one or several similarly looking characters.

       //IGNORE
	      When the string "//IGNORE" is appended to tocode, characters that cannot be represented in the target character set will be silently
	      discarded.

       The resulting conversion descriptor  can  be  used  with  iconv(3)  any	number	of  times.   It  remains  valid  until	deallocated  using
       iconv_close(3).

       A conversion descriptor contains a conversion state.  After creation using iconv_open(), the state is in the initial state.  Using iconv(3)
       modifies the descriptor's conversion state.  To bring the state back to the initial state, use iconv(3) 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.

VERSIONS

       This function is available in glibc since version 2.1.

ATTRIBUTES

       For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).

       +-------------+---------------+----------------+
       |Interface    | Attribute     | Value	      |
       +-------------+---------------+----------------+
       |iconv_open() | Thread safety | MT-Safe locale |
       +-------------+---------------+----------------+

CONFORMING TO

       POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008, SUSv2.

SEE ALSO

       iconv(1), iconv(3), iconv_close(3)

COLOPHON

       This page is part of release 4.15 of the Linux man-pages project.  A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and  the
       latest version of this page, can be found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

GNU
								    2017-09-15							     ICONV_OPEN(3)