From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2005-12-15T05:52:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Iconv weirdness on Windows XP

On 12/14/05, Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/14/05, Curt Hibbs <ml.chibbs@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks Dave, I already had you on my list of people to contact if/when
> > I run into trouble.
> >
> > I'm planning to go through all the extensions included with One-Click
> > installer (many of which I pick up in binary form) to see how there
> > were compiled.
>
> Cool. This issue has bugged me, so I'm writing a test suite for Iconv,
> in order to better understand it.
>
Hrm.  The Win32 version of iconv seems to support far fewer encodings.
There are only 296 encodings that are valid, out of a total of 959
supported by iconv according to iconv -l.
That same test script yields 936 encodings on a SuSE Linux box.
Oddly, there are some encodings that work on Win32, but not on the
Linux system. This one is an example:
Iconv.new('ISO_646.IRV:1991','ISO_646.IRV:1991').iconv('')
Works in Windows, raises Errno::EINVAL in Linux.
On the other hand:
Iconv.new('500','500').iconv('')
raises Iconv::InvalidEncoding in Win32, works fine in Linux

Where does the Win32 version get its list of encodings?

Fun stuff.
--Wilson.