ICONV_OPEN(3) Linux Programmer's Manual ICONV_OPEN(3)NAMEiconv_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
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 ALSOiconv(3)iconvctl(3)iconv_close(3)GNU November 23, 2010 ICONV_OPEN(3)