This library provides an iconv() implementation, for use on systems which don't have one, or whose implementation cannot convert from/to Unicode. It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode conversion. It has also some limited support for transliteration, i.e. when a character cannot be represented in the target character set, it can be approximated through one or several similarly looking characters. libiconv is for you if your application needs to support multiple character encodings, but that support lacks from your system. See either README or website for the list of supported encodings. WWW: http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/