Hi,

I am currently programming with GNU libiconv on Debian GNU/Linux. I was told 
that the NetBSD iconv implementation does some things a bit different.

Mainly, I am interested in some details about easy converting characters from 
local input to an UCS-4 encoded string.
To do this, GNU libiconv suggests (for iconv_open()) using "" (empty string) 
or "char" for conversion from/to charset as defined by the current locale 
(char*), and "wchar_t" for conversion from/to wchar_t*.
Another method for the encoding of the string inside a char* that was read 
from the system may be to use nl_langinfo(CODESET).

What is the suggested method for NetBSD's iconv implementation? Note that I 
cannot really use wchar_t as I need to do assumptions about the encoding and 
the numeric values of specific characters.

Currently, I do a runtime check like
iconv_open("","");
iconv_open("char","char")
icovn_open(nl_langinfo(CODESET),nl_langinfo(CODESET));
and look at the return value _not_ being (iconv_t)-1.
Will this work with NetBSD's iconv implementation?

Are there any other things to check about this?

Thanks for your help

Hendrik Sattler