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},
              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: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
              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
       similarly looking characters.

       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
       UNIX98

SEE ALSO

       iconv(3), iconvctl(3), iconv_close(3)



GNU                              May 18, 2006                    ICONV_OPEN(3)