9.403 iconv_open

POSIX specification:
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/iconv_open.html

Gnulib module: iconv, iconv_open, iconv_open-utf

Portability problems fixed by either Gnulib module iconv or iconv_open:

• GNU libiconv is not found if installed in $PREFIX/lib.
• No converter from EUC-JP to UTF-8 is provided on some platforms: HP-UX 11.

Portability problems fixed by Gnulib module iconv_open:

• This function recognizes only non-standard aliases for many encodings (not the IANA registered encoding names) on many platforms: AIX 5.1, HP-UX 11, IRIX 6.5, OSF/1 5.1, Solaris 11 2010-11.

Portability problems fixed by Gnulib module iconv_open-utf:

• This function does not support the encodings UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE on many platforms: AIX 5.1, HP-UX 11, IRIX 6.5, OSF/1 5.1, Solaris 8.

Portability problems not fixed by Gnulib:

• This function is missing on some platforms: Mac OS X 10.5, FreeBSD 6.0, OpenBSD 3.8, Minix 3.1.8, IRIX 5.3, Cygwin, mingw, MSVC 9, BeOS, when GNU libiconv is not installed.
• For some encodings A and B, this function cannot convert directly from A to B, although an indirect conversion from A through UTF-8 to B is possible. This occurs on some platforms: Solaris 11 2010-11. Gnulib provides a higher-level facility striconveh (a wrapper around iconv) that deals with this problem.
• The set of supported encodings and conversions is system dependent.