libiconv anyone ?

libiconv anyone ?

[John Emmas]

Recently I've been trying to find a library called "iconv" (it's needed 
by libxml I believe).  Many years ago I obtained a pre-built 'dev' 
version when building libxml for Win32 (i.e. the dev version offers 
Dll's + libs + header files).  But I can't seem to find a Win64 version 
anywhere and I've been told it's now part of libc.

Is that correct?  And if so, can I obtain a Win64 'dev' version?  Or is 
it only buildable from source these days?  Many thanks,

John Emmas

Re: libiconv anyone ?

[Allin Cottrell]

On Mon, 28 Sep 2020, John Emmas wrote:

> Recently I've been trying to find a library called "iconv" (it's needed by 
> libxml I believe).  Many years ago I obtained a pre-built 'dev' version when 
> building libxml for Win32 (i.e. the dev version offers Dll's + libs + header 
> files).  But I can't seem to find a Win64 version anywhere and I've been told 
> it's now part of libc.
>
> Is that correct?  And if so, can I obtain a Win64 'dev' version?  Or is it 
> only buildable from source these days?  Many thanks,

Try
https://packages.msys2.org/package/mingw-w64-x86_64-libiconv

--
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University

Re: libiconv anyone ?

[John Emmas]

On 28/09/2020 12:53, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Sep 2020, John Emmas wrote:
>
>> can I obtain a Win64 'dev' version?  Or is it only buildable from 
>> source these days?  Many thanks,
>
> Try
> https://packages.msys2.org/package/mingw-w64-x86_64-libiconv
>

Thanks Allin - I did reply to your email yesterday but it didn't seem to 
reach the list for some reason.  And FWIW I've just found a git project 
this morning for building libiconv with VS2019:-

https://github.com/pffang/libiconv-for-Windows

I've no idea if it works but at least I've got 2 paths I can follow 
now!  Thanks again,

John

Re: libiconv anyone ?

[Florian Weimer]

* John Emmas:

> Recently I've been trying to find a library called "iconv" (it's
> needed by libxml I believe).  Many years ago I obtained a pre-built
> 'dev' version when building libxml for Win32 (i.e. the dev version
> offers Dll's + libs + header files).  But I can't seem to find a Win64
> version anywhere and I've been told it's now part of libc.

We have an implementation of the iconv interfaces, but it is really
tightly integrated with glibc and fairly advanced POSIX functionality
such as dlopen.  I doubt it is feasible to extract the implementation
for building on Windows.

Thanks,
Florian
-- 
Red Hat GmbH, https://de.redhat.com/ , Registered seat: Grasbrunn,
Commercial register: Amtsgericht Muenchen, HRB 153243,
Managing Directors: Charles Cachera, Brian Klemm, Laurie Krebs, Michael O'Neill

Re: libiconv anyone ?

[John Emmas]

On 28/09/2020 13:06, Florian Weimer wrote:
> We have an implementation of the iconv interfaces, but it is really
> tightly integrated with glibc and fairly advanced POSIX functionality
> such as dlopen.  I doubt it is feasible to extract the implementation
> for building on Windows.
>

Thanks Florian - I'm curious to know what libiconv does.  It seems to 
get used quite extensively (libxml / fontconfig / gettext etc) but I've 
never been sure what it does.

Also... are libc and glibc the same thing? (that's something else I've 
always wondered about !!)

John

Re: libiconv anyone ?

[Florian Weimer]

* John Emmas:

> On 28/09/2020 13:06, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> We have an implementation of the iconv interfaces, but it is really
>> tightly integrated with glibc and fairly advanced POSIX functionality
>> such as dlopen.  I doubt it is feasible to extract the implementation
>> for building on Windows.
>
> Thanks Florian - I'm curious to know what libiconv does.  It seems to
> get used quite extensively (libxml / fontconfig / gettext etc) but
> I've never been sure what it does.

It provides character set conversion facilities.  It seems that Windows
has similar functionality in the form of the WideCharToMultiByte and
MultiByteToWideChar functions.

I just realized that another obstacle to for porting iconv to Windows is
that our implementation assumes that wchar_t is 32 bits, while Windows
uses UCS-2 or UTF-16 extensively (so it leans towards 16 bits for wide
characters).

> Also... are libc and glibc the same thing? (that's something else I've
> always wondered about !!)

“libc” is sometimes used to refer to the non-compiler parts of a C
implementation, that is, the C run-time library, so something like
MSVCRT.DLL.  Even on Linux, there are several different C run-time
libraries in wide use, and glibc is just one of them.

Thanks,
Florian
-- 
Red Hat GmbH, https://de.redhat.com/ , Registered seat: Grasbrunn,
Commercial register: Amtsgericht Muenchen, HRB 153243,
Managing Directors: Charles Cachera, Brian Klemm, Laurie Krebs, Michael O'Neill