ICU provides the following services: Unicode text handling, full character properties, and character set conversions; Unicode regular expressions; full Unicode sets; character, word, and line boundaries; language-sensitive collation and searching; normalization, upper and lowercase conversion, and script transliterations; comprehensive locale data and resource bundle architecture via the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR); multiple calendars and time zones; and rule-based formatting and parsing of dates, times, numbers, currencies, and messages. ICU provided complex text layout service for Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, and Thai historically, but that was deprecated in version 54, and was completely removed in version 58 in favor of HarfBuzz.^[4]


ICU provides more extensive internationalization facilities than the standard libraries for C and C++. Future ICU 75 planned for April 2024 will require C++17 (up from C++11) or C11 (up from C99), depending on what languages is used. ICU has historically used UTF-16, and still does only for Java; while for C/C++ UTF-8 is supported,^[5][6] including the correct handling of "illegal UTF-8".^[7]


ICU 73.2 has improved significant changes for GB18030-2022 compliance support, i.e. for Chinese (that updated Chinese GB18030 Unicode Transformation Format standard is slightly incompatible); has "a modified character conversion table, mapping some GB18030 characters to Unicode characters that were encoded after GB18030-2005" and has a number of other changes such as improving Japanese and Korean short-text line breaking, and in "English, the name “Türkiye” is now used for the country instead of “Turkey” (the alternate spelling is also available in the data)."^[8]


ICU 74 "updates to Unicode 15.1, including new characters, emoji, security mechanisms, and corresponding APIs and implementations. [..] ICU 74 and CLDR 44 are major releases, including a new version of Unicode and major locale data improvements."^[9] Of the many changes some are for person name formatting, or for improved language support, e.g. for Low German, and there's e.g. a new spoof checker API, following the (latest version) Unicode 15.1.0 UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanism.

Older version details[edit]

ICU 72 updated to Unicode 15 (and 73.2 to latest 15.1). "In many formatting patterns, ASCII spaces are replaced with Unicode spaces (e.g., a "thin space")." ICU (ICU4J) now requires Java 8 but "Most of the ICU 72 library code should still work with Java 7 / Android API level 21, but we no longer test with Java 7."^[10] ICU 71 added e.g. phrase-based line breaking for Japanese (earlier methods didn't work well for short Japanese text, such as in titles and headings) and support for Hindi written in Latin letters (hi_Latn), also referred to as "Hinglish". ICU 70 added e.g. support for emoji properties of strings and can now be built and used with C++20 compilers (and "ICU operator==() and operator!=() functions now return bool instead of UBool, as an adjustment for incompatible changes in C++20"),^[11] and as of that version the minimum Windows version is Windows 7. ICU 67 handles removal of Great Britain from the EU. ICU 64.2 added support for Unicode 12.1, i.e. the single new symbol for current Japanese Reiwa era (but support for it has also been backported to older ICU versions down to ICU 4.8.2). ICU 58 (with Unicode 9.0 support) is the last version to support older platforms such as Windows XP and Windows Vista. Support for AIX, Solaris and z/OS may also be limited in later versions (i.e. building depends on compiler support).^[12]

MessageFormat[edit]

A part of ICU is the MessageFormat class, a formatting system that allows for any number of arguments to control the plural form (plural, selectordinal) or more general switch-case-style selection (select) for things like grammatical gender. These statements can be nested.^[17] ICU MessageFormat was created by adding the plural and selection system to an identically-named system in Java SE.

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