| iconv_open - allocate descriptor for character set conversion | 
| #include <iconv.h> iconv_t iconv_open (const char* tocode, const char* fromcode); | 
| The iconv_open function allocates a conversion descriptor suitable for converting byte sequences from character encoding fromcode to character encoding tocode. | 
| The values permitted for fromcode and tocode and the supported combinations are system dependent. For the libiconv library, the following encodings are supported, in all combinations. | 
| European languages | 
| ASCII, ISO-8859-{1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,13,14,15,16}, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, CP{1250,1251,1252,1253,1254,1257}, CP{850,866}, Mac{Roman,CentralEurope,Iceland,Croatian,Romania}, Mac{Cyrillic,Ukraine,Greek,Turkish}, Macintosh | 
| Semitic languages | 
| ISO-8859-{6,8}, CP{1255,1256}, CP862, Mac{Hebrew,Arabic} | 
| Japanese | 
| EUC-JP, SHIFT_JIS, CP932, ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-JP-2, ISO-2022-JP-1 | 
| Chinese | 
| EUC-CN, HZ, GBK, GB18030, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950, BIG5-HKSCS, ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-EXT | 
| Korean | 
| EUC-KR, CP949, ISO-2022-KR, JOHAB | 
| Armenian | 
| ARMSCII-8 | 
| Georgian | 
| Georgian-Academy, Georgian-PS | 
| Tajik | 
| KOI8-T | 
| Thai | 
| TIS-620, CP874, MacThai | 
| Laotian | 
| MuleLao-1, CP1133 | 
| Vietnamese | 
| VISCII, TCVN, CP1258 | 
| Platform specifics | 
| HP-ROMAN8, NEXTSTEP | 
| Full Unicode | 
| UTF-8 | 
| UCS-2, UCS-2BE, UCS-2LE | 
| UCS-4, UCS-4BE, UCS-4LE | 
| UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE | 
| UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE | 
| UTF-7 | 
| C99, JAVA | 
| Full Unicode, in terms of uint16_t or uint32_t | 
| (with machine dependent endianness and alignment) | 
| UCS-2-INTERNAL, UCS-4-INTERNAL | 
| Locale dependent, in terms of char or wchar_t | 
| (with machine dependent endianness and alignment, and with semantics depending on the OS and the current LC_CTYPE locale facet) | 
| char, wchar_t | 
| When configured with the option --enable-extra-encodings, it also provides support for a few extra encodings: | 
| European languages | 
| CP{437,737,775,852,853,855,857,858,860,861,863,865,869,1125}
 | 
| Semitic languages | 
| CP864 | 
| Japanese | 
| EUC-JISX0213, Shift_JISX0213, ISO-2022-JP-3 | 
| Turkmen | 
| TDS565 | 
| Platform specifics | 
| RISCOS-LATIN1 | 
| The empty encoding name "" is equivalent to "char": it denotes the locale dependent character encoding. | 
| When the string "//TRANSLIT" is appended to tocode, transliteration is activated. This means that when a character cannot be represented in the target character set, it can be approximated through one or several similarly looking characters. | 
| When the string "//IGNORE" is appended to tocode, characters that cannot be represented in the target character set will be silently discarded. | 
| The resulting conversion descriptor can be used with iconv any number of times. It remains valid until deallocated using iconv_close. | 
| A conversion descriptor contains a conversion state. After creation using iconv_open, the state is in the initial state. Using iconv modifies the descriptor's conversion state. (This implies that a conversion descriptor can not be used in multiple threads simultaneously.) To bring the state back to the initial state, use iconv with NULL as inbuf argument. | 
| The iconv_open function returns a freshly allocated conversion descriptor. In case of error, it sets errno and returns (iconv_t)(-1). | 
| The following error can occur, among others: | 
| EINVAL | 
| The conversion from fromcode to tocode is not supported by the implementation. | 
| UNIX98 | 
| iconv(3), iconv_close(3) |