What is ICU?

What is ICU? #

  • Stands for International Components for Unicode
  • A set of libraries supporting localisation and internationalisation

ICU does a number of things:

  1. Text handling and Unicode Support

    • Unicode is a standard encoding system for all the languages in the world. 倪好!
    • Allows software to process characters correctly regardless of language, ex. for applications that need to handle multilingual text.

  2. String Comparison and Sorting

    • Different languages have rules for alphabetising text, and ICU provides functions that sort text according to regional language rules (collation) to make sure words are ordered correctly in each language.