International Components for Unicode

International Components for Unicode

An open-source library providing robust and comprehensive Unicode support and globalization services for software applications, including locale data and time zone information.

What is International Components for Unicode?

International Components for Unicode (ICU) is an open-source library that provides robust and comprehensive Unicode support and software internationalization (i18n) services for globalized software applications. Developed by IBM and later contributed to Unicode consortium, ICU is widely used across various platforms and programming languages.

ICU provides the following main services:

• Unicode text handling, storage and processing functions like text boundary analysis, normalization, encoding conversion, collation (sorting), search and regular expressions.
• Locale data and formatting services for date, time, number, currency, messaging formats as per regional conventions.
• Time zone information and calculations.
• Text translation and transliteration services.

By using ICU instead of writing their own globalization code, developers can build cross-platform software that work seamlessly across various languages, regions and operating environments. Popular open-source projects like Python, PHP, Mozilla and Android rely on ICU for i18n support. Overall, ICU saves significant developer effort and helps avoid subtle bugs arising from Unicode handling.

International Components for Unicode Features

Official Links