Universal UCS converter

UCS-2 is a universal 16-bit encoding that can be used as an interchange medium to provide conversion capability between virtually any code sets.

The conversion can be accomplished using the Universal UCS Converter, which converts between any two code sets XXX and YYY as follows:
XXX <-> UTF-32 <-> YYY

The XXX and YYY conversions must be included in the supported List of UCS-2 Interchange Converters, and must be installed on the system.

The universal converter is installed as the file /usr/lib/nls/loc/iconv/Universal_UCS_Conv.

The conversion between multibyte and wide character code depends on the current locale setting. Do not exchange wide character codes between two processes, unless you have knowledge that each locale that might be used handles wide character codes in a consistent fashion. Most locales for this operating system use the Unicode character value as a wide character code, except locales based on IBM-eucTW code sets.