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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 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,Roma-nia}, Mac{Roman,CentralEurope,Iceland,Croatian,Romania},
              nia}, 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,   CP936,  GB18030,  EUC-TW,  BIG5,  CP950,  BIG5-HKSCS,  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

       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

       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  encod-ing. encoding.
       ing.

       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 discarded.

       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 modifies the descriptor's conversion state. (This implies that a  con-version conversion
       version  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), iconvctl(3), iconv_close(3)



GNU                                             May 18, 2006                                   ICONV_OPEN(3)