iconv

• infos = Information about iconv plugin is in keys below
• infos/author = Markus Raab [email protected]
• infos/licence = BSD
• infos/needs =
• infos/provides = conv
• infos/placements = pregetstorage postgetstorage presetstorage
• infos/description = Converts values of keys between charsets

Introduction

This plugin is a filter plugin that converts between different character encodings, or, if the checkfile configuration key is set to anything except "0", validates the fileencoding before reading the file.

Purpose

Consider a user insisting on a latin1 character encoding because of some old application. All other users already use, for example, UTF-8. For these users, the configuration files are encoded in UTF-8. So we need a solution for the user with latin1 to access the key database with proper encoding.

On the other hand, contemplate an XML file which requires a specific encoding. But the other key databases work well with the users encoding. So a quick fix for that backend is needed to feed that XML file with a different encoding.

Iconv plugin provides a solution for both scenarios. It converts between many available character encodings. With the plugin’s configuration the user can change the from and to encoding. The default values of the plugin configuration are: from encoding will be determined at run time. to encoding is UTF-8.

Note that for writing the configuration from and to is swapped. A key database that requires a specific encoding can make use of it. To sum up, every user can select a different encoding, but the key databases are still properly encoded for anyone.

If a user wants to validate a files encoding before reading the file, the checkfile key has to be set. When set to 0 the feature is turned off, every other value turns it on. File validation returns an error if a byte sequence thats not legal in from is detected and the file will not be read.