Ch libiconv Package

Ch libiconv Package is Ch interface to libiconv. Ch is a C/C++ interpretive freely available from htpp://www.softintegration.com. Ch libiconv Package alllows character enconding conversion applications based on GNU libiconv runs in Ch across platform without compilation. Ch libiconv Package includes the source code for building the binding to libicon.

For historical reasons, international text is often encoded using a language or country dependent character encoding. With the advent of the internet and the frequent exchange of text across countries - even the viewing of a web page from a foreign country is a "text exchange" in this context -, conversions between these encodings have become important. They have also become a problem, because many characters which are present in one encoding are absent in many other encodings. To solve this mess, the Unicode encoding has been created. It is a super-encoding of all others and is therefore the default encoding for new text formats like XML.

Release Notes

Ch liniconv Package for GNU character encodings conversion toolkit version 2.0, May 4th, 2005

Ch liniconv Package for GNU character encodings conversion toolkit version 1.0, June 4, 2004

System Requirements

Introduction to libiconv

Many computers operate in locale with a traditional (limited) character encoding. Some programs, like mailers and web browsers, must be able to convert between a given text encoding and the user's encoding. Other programs internally store strings in Unicode, to facilitate internal processing, and need to convert between internal string representation (Unicode) and external string representation (a traditional encoding) when they are doing I/O. GNU libiconv is a conversion library for both kinds of applications.

Details

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}, 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, GB18030, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950, BIG5-HKSCS, 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

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 OS and locale dependent semantics)

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

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

Turkmen

TDS565

Platform specifics

RISCOS-LATIN1

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.