ICU

The International Components for Unicode (ICU) libraries
provide robust and full-featured Unicode services on a
wide variety of platforms. ICU supports the most current
version of the Unicode standard, and they provide support
for supplementary Unicode characters.

As computing environments become more heterogeneous, software
portability becomes more important. ICU lets you produce the
same results across all the various platforms you support,
without sacrificing performance. It offers great flexibility
to extend and customize the supplied services, which include:

· Text: Unicode text handling, full character properties and
character set conversions (500+ codepages)

· Analysis: Unicode regular expressions; full Unicode sets;
character, word and line boundaries

· Comparison: Language sensitive collation and searching

· Transformations: normalization, upper/lowercase, script
transliterations (50+ pairs)

· Locales: Comprehensive locale data (230+) and resource
bundle architecture

· Complex Text Layout: Arabic, Hebrew, Indic and Thai

· Time: Multi-calendar and time zone

· Formatting and Parsing: dates, times, numbers, currencies,
messages and rule based

ICU is an open source development project sponsored, supported,
and used by IBM. It is dedicated to providing robust, full-featured,
commercial quality, freely available Unicode-based technologies.
The ICU library supports multi-threading environments, and is
available in C, C++ and Java (ICU4J).