Introduction

This module contains an interface to iconv character set conversion facility. With this module, you can turn a string represented by a local character set into the one represented by another character set, which may be the Unicode character set. Supported character sets depend on the iconv implementation of your system. Note that the iconv function on some systems may not work as you expect. In such case, it'd be a good idea to install the GNU libiconv library. It will most likely end up with more consistent results.

Since PHP 5.0.0, this extension comes with various utility functions that help you to write multilingual scripts. Let's have a look at the following sections to explore the new features.

Requirements

You will need nothing if the system you are using is one of the recent POSIX-compliant systems because standard C libraries that are supplied in them must provide iconv facility. Otherwise, you have to get the libiconv library installed in your system.

Installation

To use functions provided by this module, the PHP binary must be built with the following configure line: --with-iconv[=DIR].

Runtime Configuration

The behaviour of these functions is affected by settings in php.ini.

Resource Types

This extension has no resource types defined.

Predefined Constants

Since PHP 4.3.0 it is possible to identify at runtime which iconv implementation is adopted by this extension.

Since PHP 5.0.0, the following constants are also available:

See Also

See also GNU Recode functions.