Unicode Explained

while ((line = infile.readLine( )) != null) {

Matcher m = regexp.matcher(line);

if (m.find()) {

System.out.println(line);

}

}

}

}

International Components for Unicode (ICU)

The

International Components for Unicode (ICU) activity is driven by major software

companies, but it involves voluntary work too and is based on the open source prin-

ciple. The ICU software consists of components (subroutines, modules) that are avail-

able as source code and portable to different operating systems. ICU is often charac-

terized as a “project,” but by its nature, it has to be a continuous activity, to keep up

with the development of the Unicode standard and related specifications.

Originally released (in 1999) as “IBM Classes for Unicode” and still substantially sup-

ported by IBM and other vendors, ICU has become the first choice for building software

that works with Unicode data, when possible. ICU was originally written in Java, and

later support to C and C++ has been added. The Java version is called ICU4J, and the

C and C++ version is ICU4C.

The official ICU site is hosted at http://www.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/. It

contains a handy “Getting started with ICU” section. The other key site is found at

http://icu.sourceforge.net/ and is by SourceForge, the development and download re-

pository of open source code and applications. The sites are linked together in many

ways, so you can start in either of them. ICU contains software components for several

purposes:

Basic text

Unicode text handling, character properties, and character code conversions

Text analysis

Unicode regular expressions and characters, operations on collections (sets) of

characters, and detection of word and line boundaries

Sorting and searching

Language-sensitive collation and searching

Transformations

Normalization forms, case mappings, transliterations

Locales

General locale data and resource bundle architecture

Complex text layout

For example, Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, and Thai

International Components for Unicode (ICU) | 619