1.2 KiB
libiconv
International text is mostly encoded in Unicode. For historical reasons, however, it is sometimes still 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 a necessity. In particular, computers with the Windows operating system still 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.
The libiconv and libcharset libraries and their header files are under LGPL. The iconv program is under GPL.
libiconv can be downloaded from https://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.17.tar.gz.