libiconv

This library provides an iconv() implementation, for use on systems which don't have one, or whose implementation cannot convert from/to Unicode.

It provides support for the encodings:

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{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: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

ISO-8859-11, 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 OS and locale dependent semantics)

char, wchar_t
The empty encoding name "" is equivalent to "char": it denotes the locale dependent character encoding.

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

It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode conversion.

It has also some limited support for transliteration, i.e. when a character cannot be represented in the target character set, it can be approximated through one or several similarly looking characters. Transliteration is activated when "//TRANSLIT" is appended to the target encoding name.

libiconv is for you if your application needs to support multiple character encodings, but that support lacks from your system.