iconv

iconv is a computer program and a standardized application programming interface (API) used to convert between different character encodings.^[1] "It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode conversion."^[2]

History

The iconv API is the standard programming interface for converting character strings from one character encoding to another in Unix-like operating systems.

Initially appearing on the HP-UX operating system,^[3] it was standardized within XPG4 and is part of the Single UNIX Specification (SUS).

All recent Linux distributions contain a free implementation of iconv utility and iconv() function as part of the GNU C Library which is the C library for current Linux systems.^[2] The library's iconv() function is licensed as LGPL, so it is linkable with closed source applications, while the iconv utility is licensed as GPL, so derivatives must be open and in GPL too. To use the library, the GNU glibc locales need to be installed, which are provided as a separate package (usually named glibc-locale) normally installed by default.^[2]

Usage

stdin can be converted from ISO-8859-1 to current locale and output to stdout using:^[4]

iconv -f iso-8859-1

An input file infile can be converted from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and output to output file outfile using:

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 <infile >outfile

Ports

Under Microsoft Windows, the iconv binary (and thus, likely also the API) is provided by the Cygwin and GnuWin32 environments or native Win32 port win_iconv.exe.^[5]

iconv is also available for many programming languages. For example, one of the libraries supported by PHP^[6] (also under Windows using a DLL file), so it is possible to use iconv() from a PHP program easily.

References

External links

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more nl paste printf sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs yes

Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal expr lp od sleep true and false

List of Unix utilities

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