# Uconv alternative to iconv

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/uconv-alternative-to-iconv/128165>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [February 5, 2008, 2:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/uconv-alternative-to-iconv/128165 "2008-02-05T14:34:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![pedz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/839c29/32.png) [@pedz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pedz)\
**Post date:** [February 5, 2008, 2:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/uconv-alternative-to-iconv/128165/1 "2008-02-05T14:34:46Z")

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There is a much more complete character set translation library  
available here:

> **[ICU User Guide](https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/)**
>
> ICU User Guide

The download to the files is on that page. But for convenience here it  
is:

> **[ICU - International Components for Unicode - Downloading ICU](https://icu.unicode.org/download/)**
>
> Latest Release
> 2023-06-15: ICU 73.2 is now available. Maintenance release with changes for GB18030 compliance, English AM/PM spaces, word segmentation around @ sign, etc. See Downloading ICU \> ICU 73.
> 2023-04-13: ICU 73 is now available. It...

There is a Ruby wrapper for the library here:

[https://rubyforge.org/projects/icu4r/](https://rubyforge.org/projects/icu4r/)

That particular page says the icu4r project is dead but it works fine  
for me.

The real creator of this (as far as I can tell) is IBM. And, they know  
a lot about the topic. The ICU stuff includes all the weird EBCDIC  
pages which is what led me to find it.

It seems very complete and has more code pages than any other version of  
iconv I’ve seen.