Code sets and converters

Code sets can be classified into two categories: stateful encodings and stateless encodings.

Stateful code sets and converters
The stateful encodings use shift-in and shift-out codes to change state. Shift-out can be used to indicate the start of host double-byte data in a data stream of characters, and shift-in can be used to indicate the end of this double-byte character data. When the double-byte data is off, it signals the start of single-byte character data. An example of such a stateful code set is IBM-930 used mainly on mainframes (hosts).
Stateless code sets and converters
The section will discuss stateless code sets and converters.

Parent topic: Writing converters using the iconv interface