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 (needed for GB 18030 repertoire support).

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