libcharset - portable character set determination library

This library provides a function which determines the character set / encoding of text in the currently selected locale (the LC_CTYPE locale facet).

It is useful for portable programs which need to process text in other encodings and locales than the currently selected one. Possible uses:

Use of Unicode in POSIX compliant applications.
Conversion of text between the current locale's encoding and UTF-8 (or any other given encoding).
Mail agents.

In theory, this would be very simple: POSIX provides the nl_langinfo function, in such a way that

                  nl_langinfo (CODESET)

returns the encoding name. But the nl_langinfo function still does not exist on some systems, and on those where it exists it returns unstandardized variations of the encoding names, like (on Solaris) "PCK" for "Shift_JIS".

This library fixes these flaws and provides a function

       const char * locale_charset (void);

It determines the current locale's character encoding, and canonicalizes it into one of the canonical names listed in config.charset. The result must not be freed; it is statically allocated. If the canonical name cannot be determined, the result is a non-canonical name.

Installation:

As usual for GNU packages:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ make
$ make install

This library is used in

GNU coreutils
GNU gettext
GNU clisp

To integrate this library into your package:

Either from this package. See file INTEGRATE.
Or from gnulib. See <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/MODULES.html#module=localcharset>

Distribution: The libcharset directory of ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.8.tar.gz

libcharset package
Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>

Last modified: 18 October 2009.