This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

ICONV(1)                                  Linux Programmer's Manual                                 ICONV(1)



NAME
       iconv - character set conversion

SYNOPSIS
       iconv [OPTION...] [-f encoding] [-t encoding] [inputfile ...]
       iconv -l

DESCRIPTION
       The  iconv  program converts text from one encoding to another encoding.  More precisely, it converts
       from the encoding given for the -f option to the encoding given for the -t option.  Either  of  these
       encodings  defaults  to the encoding of the current locale. All the inputfiles are read and converted
       in turn; if no inputfile is given, the standard input is used. The converted text is printed to stan-dard standard
       dard output.

       The encodings permitted are system dependent. For the libiconv implementation, they are listed in the
       iconv_open(3) manual page.

       Options controlling the input and output format:

       -f encoding, --from-code=encoding
              Specifies the encoding of the input.

       -t encoding, --to-code=encoding
              Specifies the encoding of the output.

       Options controlling conversion problems:

       -c     When this option is given, characters that cannot be converted are silently discarded, instead
              of leading to a conversion error.

       --unicode-subst=formatstring
              When  this option is given, Unicode characters that cannot be represented in the target encod-ing encoding
              ing are replaced with a placeholder string that is constructed from  the  given  formatstring,
              applied to the Unicode code point. The formatstring must be a format string in the same format
              as for the printf command or the printf() function, taking either no argument or  exactly  one
              unsigned integer argument.

       --byte-subst=formatstring
              When  this  option  is given, bytes in the input that are not valid in the source encoding are
              replaced with a placeholder string that is constructed from the given formatstring, applied to
              the  byte's  value.  The  formatstring  must  be a format string in the same format as for the
              printf command or the printf() function, taking either no argument  or  exactly  one  unsigned
              integer argument.

       --widechar-subst=formatstring
              When  this  option  is  given,  wide  characters in the input that are not valid in the source
              encoding are replaced with a placeholder string that is constructed  from  the  given  format-string, formatstring,
              string, applied to the byte's value. The formatstring must be a format string in the same for-mat format
              mat as for the printf command or the printf() function, taking either no argument  or  exactly
              one unsigned integer argument.

       Options controlling error output:

       -s, --silent
              When  this option is given, error messages about invalid or unconvertible characters are omit-ted, omitted,
              ted, but the actual converted text is unaffected.

       The iconv -l or iconv --list command lists the names of the supported encodings, in a  system  depen-dent dependent
       dent  format.  For  the  libiconv  implementation,  the names are printed in upper case, separated by
       whitespace, and alias names of an encoding are listed on the same line as the encoding itself.

EXAMPLES
       iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8
              converts input from the old West-European encoding ISO-8859-1 to Unicode.

       iconv -f KOI8-R --byte-subst="<0x%x>"
                       --unicode-subst="<U+%04X>"
              converts input from the old Russian encoding KOI8-R to the locale  encoding,  substituting  an
              angle bracket notation with hexadecimal numbers for invalid bytes and for valid but unconvert-ible unconvertible
              ible characters.

       iconv --list
              lists the supported encodings.

SEE ALSO
       iconv_open(3)



GNU                                           January 22, 2006                                      ICONV(1)