Copyright (c) Bruno Haible <haible@clisp.cons.org>

This is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of
the License, or (at your option) any later version.

References consulted:
GNU glibc-2 source code and manual
GNU gettext source code and manual
LI18NUX 2000 Globalization Specification

bind_textdomain_codeset - set encoding of message translations

 #include <libintl.h>  "char * bind_textdomain_codeset (const char * " domainname ,  " const char * " codeset ); 

The bind_textdomain_codeset function sets the output codeset for message catalogs for domain domainname.

A message domain is a set of translatable msgid messages. Usually, every software package has its own message domain.

By default, the gettext family of functions returns translated messages in the locale's character encoding, which can be retrieved as nl_langinfo(CODESET). The need for calling bind_textdomain_codeset arises for programs which store strings in a locale independent way (e.g. UTF-8) and want to avoid an extra character set conversion on the returned translated messages.

domainname must be a non-empty string.

If codeset is not NULL, it must be a valid encoding name which can be used for the iconv_open function. The bind_textdomain_codeset function sets the output codeset for message catalogs belonging to domain domainname to codeset. The function makes copies of the argument strings as needed.

If codeset is NULL, the function returns the previously set codeset for domain domainname. The default is NULL, denoting the locale's character encoding.

If successful, the bind_textdomain_codeset function returns the current codeset for domain domainname, after possibly changing it. The resulting string is valid until the next bind_textdomain_codeset call for the same domainname and must not be modified or freed. If a memory allocation failure occurs, it sets errno to ENOMEM and returns NULL. If no codeset has been set for domain domainname, it returns NULL. The following error can occur, among others:

ENOMEM Not enough memory available.

The return type ought to be const char *, but is char * to avoid warnings in C code predating ANSI C. gettext (3), dgettext (3), dcgettext (3), ngettext (3), dngettext (3), dcngettext (3), textdomain (3), nl_langinfo (3), iconv_open (3)