POSIX:iconv
lastmod 2026-11-10created 2020-09-013 edits
iconv is a POSIX standard API for converting character encodings. You get a conversion descriptor by specifying the source and target encoding names with iconv_open(), convert by passing input and output buffers to iconv(), and release it with iconv_close() when done. It is built into glibc and is also implemented by GNU libiconv, and the command-line tool of the same name is used to convert whole files.