I am using the iconv C API and I want iconv to detect the local encoding of the computer. Is that possible? Apparently it is because when I look in the source code, I find in the file iconv_open1.h that if the fromcode or tocode variables are empty strings ("") then the local encoding is used using the locale_charset() function call.
Someone also told me that in order to convert the locale encoding to unicode, all I needed was to use iconv_open ("UTF-8", "")
Unfortunately, I find no mention of this in the documentation.
And when I convert some iso-8859-1 text to the locale encoding (which is utf-8 on my machine), then during conversion I get errno=EILSEQ (illegal sequence). I checked and iconv_open returned no error.
If instead of the empty string in iconv_open I specify "utf-8", then I get no error. Obviously iconv failed to detect my current charset.
edit: I checked with a simple C program that puts(nl_langinfo(CODESET)) and I get ANSI_X3.4-1968 (which is ASCII). Apparently, I got a problem with charset detection.
edit: this should be related to Why is nl_langinfo(CODESET) different from locale charmap?
additional information: my program is written in Ada, and I bind at link-time to C functions. Apparently, the locale setting is not initialized the same way in the Ada runtime and C runtime.
