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In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, iconv (an abbreviation of internationalization conversion)[2] is a command-line program[3] and a standardized application programming interface (API)[4] used to convert between different character encodings. "It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode conversion."[5]
| Original author(s) | Hewlett-Packard |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Various open-source and commercial developers |
| Repository | https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/libiconv.git |
| Operating system | Unix, Unix-like, Microsoft Windows, IBM i |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Command |
| License | libiconv: LGPL iconv: GPL win-iconv: Public domain[1] |
Initially appearing on the HP-UX operating system,[6]iconv() as well as the utility was standardized within XPG4 and is part of the Single UNIX Specification (SUS).
Most Linux distributions provide an implementation, either from the GNU Standard C Library (included since version 2.1, February 1999), or the more traditional GNU libiconv, for systems based on other Standard C Libraries.
The iconv function[7] on both is licensed as LGPL, so it is linkable with closed source applications.
Unlike the libraries, the iconv utility is licensed under GPL in both implementations.[8]
The GNU libiconv implementation is portable, and can be used on various UNIX-like and non-UNIX systems. Version 0.3 dates from December 1999.
The uconv utility from International Components for Unicode provides an iconv-compatible command-line syntax for transcoding.
Most BSD systems use NetBSD's implementation, which first appeared in December 2004.
Support
Currently, over a hundred different character encodings are supported in the GNU variant.[5]
Ports
Under Microsoft Windows, the iconv library and the utility is provided by GNU's libiconv found in Cygwin[9] and GnuWin32[10] environments; there is also a "purely Win32" implementation called "win-iconv" that uses Windows' built-in routines for conversion.[11] The iconv function is also available for many programming languages.
The iconv command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.[12]
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stdin can be converted from ISO-8859-1 to current locale and output to stdout using:[13]
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> -o <outfile>
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