Libiconv. Introduction | Get the Software Introduction to libiconv 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. Iconv. Iconv is a computer program and a standardized application programming interface (API) used to convert between different character encodings.
History[edit] The iconv API is the standard programming interface for converting character strings from one character encoding to another in Unix-like operating systems. Libiconv Free Download.