CLDR Version 35.1 Language/Locale Data Released for Reiwa Era, Unicode 12.1

Unicode CLDR 35.1 is a dot release focusing on calendar and date format support for the new Reiwa era in Japan, including support for the upcoming Unicode 12.1. Version 35.1 is the latest version of CLDR, the core open-source language data that major software systems use to adapt software to the conventions of over 80 different languages. The open-source Unicode ICU library incorporates the CLDR Version 35.1 data as part of its ICU 64.2 release. ICU code is used by many products for Unicode and language support, including Android, Cloudant, ChromeOS, Db2, iOS, macOS, Windows, and many others.

In addition to updates related to the new Reiwa era, the CLDR 35.1 release includes a small number of other updates, including more localized name updates for North Macedonia, and support for tzdata 2019a.

For further details and links to documentation, see the CLDR 35.1 Release Notes.

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Over 136,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

ICU 64 Released

Unicode® ICU 64 has just been released. It updates to Unicode 12 and to CLDR 35 locale data with many additions and corrections, and some new languages. ICU adds a data filtering/subsetting mechanism, improved formatting API, and a C++ LocaleBuilder.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode Standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/64.

ICU 63 Released

Unicode® ICU 63 has just been released. It updates to CLDR 34 locale data with many additions and corrections, and some new languages. ICU adds an API for number and currency range formatting, and an API for additional Unicode properties and for constructing custom properties. CLDR and ICU include data for testing readiness for the upcoming Japanese calendar era.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/63.

ICU moves to GitHub and Jira

International Components for Unicode (ICU) is a mature, widely used set of C/C++ and Java libraries providing Unicode and Globalization support for software applications. ICU is widely portable and gives applications the same results on all platforms and between C/C++ and Java software.

As of this week, ICU has moved from a self-hosted source code and bug tracking environment, to git on GitHub and Jira on Atlassian Cloud, respectively. Pull requests are welcome, as are bug reports on the new issue tracking system.

For more information, please see the following links:

ICU Repository Access: http://site.icu-project.org/repository
ICU Bug Tracking: http://site.icu-project.org/bugs

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Adopt-a-Character

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

ICU 62 Released

Unicode® ICU 62 has just been released. It upgrades to Unicode 11 and to CLDR 33.1 locale data. A new syntax for locale-neutral number skeleton strings can be used in MessageFormat for more control over number formatting. Several still-draft NumberFormatter methods and helper classes have been modified or renamed. In C++, DecimalFormat wraps the new NumberFormatter code, and there is a new implementation for number parsing.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/62

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Adopt-a-Character

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

CLDR Version 33.1 Language/Locale Data Released for Unicode 11.0

Unicode CLDR 33.1 adds support for the recently released Unicode 11.0. Version 33.1 is the latest version of CLDR, the core open-source language data that major software systems use to adapt software to the conventions of over 80 different languages. The open-source Unicode ICU library incorporates the CLDR Version 33.1 data as part of its update to Unicode 11.0 in its ICU 62 release. ICU code is used by many products for Unicode and language support, including Android, Cloudant, ChromeOS, Db2, iOS, macOS, Windows, and many others.

The CLDR 33.1 release focuses on updates for Unicode 11.0: new names and keywords for the Unicode 11.0 emoji, Chinese collation stroke order, and script metadata. In addition, there are major improvements for names and annotations for the pre-11.0 emoji in CLDR languages. More extensive updates are planned for CLDR 34 (release expected in early October), with data submission still continuing.

For further details and links to documentation, see the CLDR 33.1 Release Notes.

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Adopt-a-Character

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

ICU 61 Released

Unicode® ICU 61 has just been released. This version upgrades to CLDR 33, has a new Java implementation for number and currency parsing, and includes many small API additions, improvements, and bug fixes.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/61

ICU 60 Released

Unicode® ICU 60 has just been released! ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

ICU 60 upgrades to Unicode 10 and CLDR 32, and ICU4J has been tested with Java 9. ICU 60 includes a new API for number formatting. There are many more features and bug fixes.

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/60

ICU 59 Released

Unicode® ICU 59 has just been released! ICU is the main avenue for many software products and libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

ICU 59 upgrades to CLDR 31 and to emoji 5.0 data, together with segmentation and bidi updates from Unicode 10 beta. The Java code for number formatting has been completely rewritten for reliability and performance. There is also a new case mapping API for styled text, and a technology preview of enhanced language matching.

There are major changes for ICU4C that will make ICU easier to use but require changes in projects using ICU: C++11, char16_t, UTF-8 source files.

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/59

ICU 58 Released

Unicode® ICU version 58 has just been released! ICU is the main avenue for many software products and libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

ICU 58 provides full support for the recent Unicode 9.0 release with 7,500 new characters and many property improvements. It covers the Unicode 9.0 emoji characters — plus the latest draft version of Emoji 4.0 — for a total of 2,444 emoji characters and sequences, including the new ZWJ sequences for gendered professions; ICU word & line breaking is updated for Emoji 4.0. ICU 58 incorporates the latest version 30 of Unicode CLDR locale data with a significant increase in data coverage.

There are a number of new APIs, including ones for measurement system unit display names (such as “acre” or “Hektar” in 80 languages), and improvements in performance and robustness. For Java, the unit tests are converted to JUnit, for easier and faster integration into test suites.

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/58

ICU joins the Unicode Consortium

Today we are welcoming the ICU project into the Unicode Consortium.

Every smartphone and laptop uses the Unicode encoding and Unicode CLDR data for language support: from Arabic to Japanese to Zulu — and even plain English. The Unicode Consortium provides the data, but has not provided software to directly use that data, until now.

The ICU (International Components for Unicode) project has long provided software that implements the Unicode data and algorithms. ICU is a mature, very widely deployed set of C/C++ and Java software libraries, open-sourced since 1999 under the stewardship of IBM. When you see a date or number written in your language on your smartphone, for example, or a list of sorted names, the formatting and sorting are done with ICU.

There has long been a close working relationship between the various Unicode Consortium committees and the ICU team, with many people working on Unicode projects as well as ICU. That has ensured that Unicode data and algorithms can be effectively and quickly implemented.

IBM made the decision to transfer ICU to the Unicode Consortium so that ICU could benefit from the formal and open governance that the Unicode Consortium offers. “IBM has a long history in our commitment to open standards as a driver of innovation for our customers worldwide,” said Helena Chapman, IBM Globalization Executive. By moving ICU under the Unicode Consortium, it provides a cross-industry, open source collaboration that will drive greater consistency and interoperability across computing platforms to the benefit of global technology users world-wide. IBM has been an active member of the Unicode Consortium since its inception, and is pleased to see this further consolidation of foundational open source globalization standards.

The ICU team has become a new Consortium technical committee, along with the other Unicode committees. ICU will be released under the Unicode open-source license (similar to the previous license), just like the Unicode Character Database and the CLDR data. For users of ICU, we’ll try to make this transition as smooth as possible.

The Unicode Consortium and the ICU team would like to thank IBM for many years of project stewardship, as well as for major past and ongoing contributions to the project.

For more information, see http://site.icu-project.org/