Iconv

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The correct title of this article is iconv. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

iconv is a computer program and a standardized API used to convert between different character encodings.

See also: List of Unix programs

1 iconv API
- 1.1 Compatibility
2 See also
3 External links

[edit] iconv API

The iconv API is the standard programming interface for converting character strings from one character encoding to another under Unix and Unix-like computing platforms. Initially appearing on the HP-UX operating system, it was standardized within XPG4 and may be even part of the IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition POSIX spec.

All recent Linux distributions contain a free implementation of iconv() as part of the GNU glibc which is the base of any recent Linux system.

To use it, the GNU glibc locales need to be installed, which is provided as a separate package, named glibc-locale usually, and is normally installed by default.

[edit] Compatibility

Under Windows, the iconv binary (and thus, likely also the API) is provided by the Cygwin and GnuWin32 environments.

Iconv is also one of the libraries supported by PHP [1] (also under Windows using a dll), so it is possible to use iconv() from a PHP program.

iconv is also required by libxml, so any application which uses libxml also requires iconv.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

extensive iconv() HP-UX manual page with example code
iconv() OpenGroup Standards page
Online interface to the iconv program
giconv a graphical interface to a patched libiconv version that recodes ASMO449+ to UTF-8

Implementations of the iconv API:

GNU libiconv, a free iconv implementation, licensed under the LGPL
- libiconv, compiled as .dll for Windows
FreeBSD port of iconv, under FreeBSD license (assumed)
Citrus, the NetBSD clib implementation, under NetBSD license (assumed)

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