Getting started with internationalization
Remarks#
Internationalization is an engineering process intended to generalize a product so that it can handle multiple languages, scripts and cultural conventions without the need for redesign or recompilation. It involves a range of activities, such as:
- Prepare software distribution platforms for a global audience
- Defining mappings for currency conversion
- Defining sorting rules which change based on the current alphabet
- Defining numeric and date formatting which adapts to the current locale selected
- Discovering the language of the user’s input, so that content can be displayed correctly
- Offering a default language, with the option to have the text transliterated from one language to another
- Permitting the user to select language-related user preferences
- Displaying times, dates, and calendar information in appropriate languages and formats
Versions#
| Version | Release Date |
|---|---|
| ICU 58 | 2016-12-09 |
| ICU 57 | 2016-03-23 |
| ICU 56 | 2015-10-07 |
| ICU 55 | 2015-04-01 |
| ICU 54 | 2014-10-01 |
| ICU 53 | 2014-04-02 |
| ICU 52 | 2013-10-09 |
| ICU 51 | 2013-03-22 |
| ICU 50 | 2012-12-17 |
| ICU 49 | 2012-03-21 |
Installation or Setup
ICU(International Components for Unicode) can be installed as a library for the following languages:
- Java: ICU4J
- C/C++: ICU4C
- Python: pyICU
- Perl: Wrappers for ICU (PICU)
- C#: ICU-dotnet
- Erlang: icu4e
- Ruby: ffi-icu
- Haskell: text-icu
- Lua: ICU4Lua
Here is a series of installion steps for a few implementations:
- ICU4J:
- place icu4j.jar in your CLASSPATH
- Optionally, place icu4j-charset.jar in your CLASSPATH for charset API support
- To build ICU4J, you will need JDK 7+ and Apache Ant 1.9+
- Set the JDK and Ant environment variables
- set JAVA_HOME=C:\jdk1.8.0
- set ANT_HOME=C:\apache-ant
- set PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\bin;%PATH%
- Run the desired target defined in build.xml. The default target is “jar” which compiles ICU4J library class files and create ICU4J jar files. For example:
- C:\icu4j>ant
- place icu4j.jar in your CLASSPATH
- ICU4C
- Place the path to ICU4C in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable so that dynamic linker can find it. For example:
- export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/icu/lib
- Or Windows:
- set PATH=%PATH%;C:\icu\dist\bin; set INCLUDE=%INCLUDE%;C:\icu\dist\include; set LIB=%LIB%;C:\icu\dist\bin
- Run the configure script and build ICU4C using a makefile:
- ./configure —prefix=/opt/icu
- Or CygWin:
- set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Cygwin\bin C:> dos2unix * C:> dos2unix -f configure
- C:> “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat” x86
- C:> bash runConfigureICU Cygwin/MSVC -prefix=/cygdrive/c/icu/dist
- Run make and make install:
- make && make install
- Place the path to ICU4C in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable so that dynamic linker can find it. For example: