Viewing the aliases and standards–ICU Converter Explorer

IANA, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, is the main source of converter aliases on the Internet. IANA does not specify the Unicode mappings for every codepage and alias, and every platform supports other aliases in addition to the IANA aliases. ICU provides a way to target the codepage conversion based upon the standard or platform. Then you can use the correct converter name and implementation that are based upon which standard you are targeting.

You can change the view of aliases for each standard by selecting the appropriate standard at the top of the page. Then, you can see the subset of aliases that a standard or platform can recognize.

For example, if you select IANA and ALL and select ShowAliases, you see all aliases recognized by IANA and ICU. Notice that the IANA set of aliases is a subset of all ICU aliases.

The Internal Converter Name column is also known as a canonical name. The canonical name is a unique ICU converter name. It is usually based upon the UTR #22 naming scheme. The canonical name is always guaranteed to be the correct converter that you require in a particular ICU release. At times, though, the mapping tables get updated between ICU releases, so this converter can change at that time. API functions similar to ucnv_getCanonicalName() and ucnv_getName() return this value. The ucnv_getStandardName() function requires this name as an argument.

The All Aliases column is not a real standard. It is a special way to see all of the aliases for a specific converter regardless of which standards support the converter's alias names.

The Untagged Aliases column is also not a real standard. It is a special way to see all of the aliases that are not associated with any particular standard. An alias in this column indicates it is a name of an alternate mapping table with the same name under a different standard. It can also indicate that this is a rarely used alias and its use is discouraged.