INSTALLATION

There are source and binary packages:

  encdec-0.3.7.zip     - zip archive of source
  encdec-0.3.7.bin.zip - Win32 encdec.dll, encdec.lib, encdec.h, docs

The  encdec  I18N  string  functions are not very useful on Windows because
encdec  uses  the  locale  dependant  character encoding as it's normalized
encoding.  On  Unix this can be UTF-8 which is Unicode and therefore it can
do  the  full  range of conversions. But on Windows it does not appear that
you  can  specify UTF-8 (there is a CP_UTF8 codepage but it does not appear
to  work  with setlocale). Unicode on Windows is designed around UCS-2LE or
UTF-16LE.  But  you could decode ISO-8859-2 strings if your locale encoding
was  Cp1250  or  do  similar  compatible  conversions. You could also write
Unicode  like  UTF-8,  UCS-2BE,  UTF-16LE,  etc.  In  theory there are many
usefull  conversions  but  you  cannot  convert from say KOI8-R to UTF-16LE
unless  the program were running in with a locale encoding of Cp1251 but if
an  incompatible  character  is  encountered  (e.g.  the  box/line  drawing
characters in KIO8-R are not in Cp1251) the string functions will return an
error.  Coupled  with  the  fact that the encoding tables are quite large a
string-less  package  is available that provides just integer, float, time,
and similar functions. 

The  .bin.zip  provides  encdec.dll  which can be placed in the PATH of the
program  using it (probably C:\WINNT\system32). If you want to build source
it  will  be  necessary to get libiconv (see GNU website mentioned below or
the  encdec download area), make that, edit Makefile.msvc, and nmake either
the  .dll  or .lib but the procedure differs depending on which you wish to
build. 

For  the  dll  the procedure is to first get Bruno Haible's libiconv source
possibly from: 

  http://www.gnu.org/directory/libiconv.html

and build it with:

  > cd libiconv-1.8
  > nmake -f Makefile.msvc distclean
  > nmake -f Makefile.msvc DLL=1 MFLAGS=-MD

Notice   I  found  the  distclean  was  necessary  with  libiconv-1.7.  See
libiconv-1.x\README.Win32  for  official  instructions.  Now  build  encdec
against   that   by  just  changing  the  LIBICONV  macro  at  the  top  of
Makefile.msvc to specify the location of the libiconv and make it: 

  > cd encdec-0.3.7
  [edit LIBICONV in Makefile.msvc]
  > nmake -f Makefile.msvc

To  make  the  static .lib just build libiconv without any nmake parameters
(described  in  libiconv-1.8\README.Win32),  change the LIBICONV macro, and
'nmake  -f  Makefile.msvc  encdec.lib'.  My procedure has been to build the
libiconv  lib,  the encdec lib, distclean libiconv, build the libiconv dll,
and finally build the encdec dll.

IMPORTANT:  On Windows it is vital that binary files be read and written in
binary mode using fopen(filename, "rb") and fopen(filename, "wb"). Buffered
streams that do not use binary mode will certainly encounter problems.