<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy, see www.w3.org">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="COPYRIGHT" content=
"Copyright (c) IBM Corporation and others. All Rights Reserved.">
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content=
"ICU; International Components for Unicode; what's new; readme; read me; introduction; downloads; downloading; building; installation;">
<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content=
"The introduction to the International Components for Unicode with instructions on building, installation, usage and other information about ICU.">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>ReadMe for ICU</title>
<style type="text/css">
h1 {border-width: 2px; border-style: solid; text-align: center; width: 100%; font-size: 200%; font-weight: bold}
h2 {margin-top: 3em; text-decoration: underline; page-break-before: always}
h2.TOC {page-break-before: auto}
h3 {margin-top: 2em; text-decoration: underline}
h4 {text-decoration: underline}
h5 {text-decoration: underline}
caption {font-weight: bold; text-align: left}
div.indent {margin-left: 2em}
ul.TOC {list-style-type: none}
samp {margin-left: 2em; border-style: groove; padding: 1em; display: block; background-color: #EEEEEE}
</style>
</head>
<body lang="en-US">
<h1>International Components for Unicode<br>
ICU 2.0 ReadMe</h1>
<p>Version: 2002-Mar-01<br>
Copyright © 1997-2002 International Business Machines Corporation and
others. All Rights Reserved.</p>
<!-- Remember that there is a copyright at the end too -->
<hr>
<h2 class="TOC">Table of Contents</h2>
<ul class="TOC">
<li><a href="#Introduction">Introduction</a></li>
<li><a href="#GettingStarted">Getting started</a></li>
<li><a href="#News">What is new in this release?</a></li>
<li><a href="#Download">How to Download the Source Code</a></li>
<li><a href="#SourceCode">ICU Source Code Organization</a></li>
<li>
<a href="#HowToBuild">How to Build And Install ICU</a>
<ul class="TOC">
<li><a href="#HowToBuildSupported">Supported Platforms</a></li>
<li><a href="#HowToBuildWindows">Windows</a></li>
<li><a href="#HowToBuildUnix">Unix</a></li>
<li><a href="#HowToBuildOS390">OS/390 (zSeries)</a></li>
<li><a href="#HowToBuildOS400">OS/400 (iSeries)</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
<a href="#ImportantNotes">Important Notes About Using ICU</a>
<ul class="TOC">
<li><a href="#ImportantNotesWindows">Windows Platform</a></li>
<li><a href="#ImportantNotesUnix">Unix Type Platforms</a></li>
<li><a href="#ImportantNotesDefaultCP">Using the default
codepage</a></li>
<li><a href="#ImportantNotesDeprecatedAPI">Methods for enabling
deprecated APIs</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#PlatformDependencies">Platform Dependencies</a></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<h2><a name="Introduction" href="#Introduction">Introduction</a></h2>
<p>Today's software market is a global one in which it is desirable to
develop and maintain one application (single source/single binary) that
supports a wide variety of languages. The International Components for
Unicode (C/C++) provides tools to help write platform-independent
applications that are internationalized and localized, with support
for:</p>
<ul>
<li>Support for the latest version of the Unicode standard</li>
<li>Character set conversions, with support for over 200 codepages</li>
<li>Locale data for more than 160 locales</li>
<li>Text collation (sorting) based on the Unicode Collation Algorithm
(=ISO 14651), customizable and tailored for national standards</li>
<li>Transliteration services for script<->script transliterations
and general text operations</li>
<li>Resource bundles for storing and accessing localized information</li>
<li>Date/Number/Message formatting and parsing of culture-specific
input/output formats</li>
<li>Text boundary analysis for finding characters, word and sentence
boundaries</li>
</ul>
<p>ICU has a sister project <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/">ICU4J</a> that extends the
internationalization capabilities of Java to a level similar to ICU. The
ICU C/C++ project is also called ICU4C when a distinction is necessary.</p>
<h2><a name="#GettingStarted" href="#GettingStarted">Getting
started</a></h2>
<p>This document describes how to build and install ICU on your machine.
For other information about ICU please see the following table of
links.<br>
The ICU homepage also links to related information about writing
internationalized software.</p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="3" width="100%" summary="">
<caption>
Here are some useful links regarding ICU and internationalization in
general.
</caption>
<tr>
<td>ICU Homepage</td>
<td><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ICU4J Homepage</td>
<td><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions about ICU</td>
<td><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/icufaq.html">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/icufaq.html</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ICU User's Guide</td>
<td><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Download ICU Releases</td>
<td><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>API Documentation Online</td>
<td><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/apiref/">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/apiref/</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Online ICU Demos</td>
<td><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/demo/">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/demo/</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Contacts & Bug Reports/Feature Requests</td>
<td><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/archives/">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/archives/</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><strong>Important:</strong> Please make sure you understand the <a href=
"license.html">Copyright and License Information</a>.</p>
<h2><a name="News" href="#News">What is new in this release?</a></h2>
<p>The following list concentrates on changes that affect existing
applications migrating from previous ICU releases. For more news about this
release, see the <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/2.0/">ICU 2.0 download
page</a>.</p>
<h3>Support for Unicode 3.1.1</h3>
<p>ICU 2.0 has been upgraded to support <a href=
"http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/versions/Unicode3.1.1.html">Unicode
3.1.1</a>, which includes the addition of 44,946 new encoded characters.
These characters cover several historic scripts, several sets of symbols,
and a very large collection of additional CJK ideographs.</p>
<p>As part of this upgrade, a number of ICU services have been reviewed and
improved with regards to handling supplementary characters (surrogate
pairs). Especially, normalization is revamped for support of supplementary
characters and higher performance.</p>
<h3>Euro transition</h3>
<p>Locale data for countries that are switching their national currencies
to the Euro is updated to use the Euro symbol and appropriate currency
formatting. The old data is available in _PREEURO locale variants. The
_EURO variant selector can still be used to unambiguously get Euro currency
symbol formatting. For some time around the transition, software should
explicitly specify _PREEURO and _EURO variants to make sure to get the
intended currency format.</p>
<p>For more on this topic see the <a href=
"http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/unicode/library/u-euro/">developerWorks
article "Are you really ready for the Euro?"</a>.</p>
<h3>API changes</h3>
<p>Functions that take C-style string input arguments with const UChar *src
and int32_t srcLength now consistently treat srcLength==-1 to mean that the
input string is NUL-terminated and get srcLength=u_strlen(src).</p>
<p>Functions that take C-style string output arguments with UChar *dest and
int32_t destCapacity now handle NUL-termination of the output string
consistently. If the output length is equal to destCapacity, then dest is
filled with the output string and a warning code is set. For details about
string handling see the <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/strings.html">User's Guide
Strings chapter</a>.</p>
<p>Some APIs have been <i>deprecated</i> for a long time (more than a year)
and have been removed now.<br>
Some other APIs have been marked as <i>deprecated</i> because they are
replaced by improved APIs; the newly deprecated APIs will be available for
another year. In particular, the C++ classes UnicodeConverter, Unicode, and
BiDi are deprecated in favor of the equally powerful C APIs.<br>
A few <i>draft</i> APIs have changed, especially for transliteration.</p>
<p>APIs that take a rules or pattern string (for collation,
transliteration, message formats, etc.) now also take a
<code>UParseError</code> structure that is filled with useful debugging
information when a rule syntax error is detected. This makes it easier in
large rules to find problems. As a result, the signatures of some functions
have changed. The old signatures will be available for about a year by
#defining a constant. See affected header files for details.</p>
<p>The C++ Normalizer class had a partially broken model for iterative
normalization; this is redone in a more consistent way. See the <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/apiref/class_Normalizer.html">Normalizer
API documentation</a> for details.</p>
<h3>Memory and resource cleanup</h3>
<p>ICU is carefully tested for memory leaks. Some memory is held in
internal caches that do not normally get released during normal operation.
These are not leaks because ICU continues to use them as necessary.</p>
<p>For testing purposes (for memory leaks) and for a small number of
applications it can be useful to close all the memory that is allocated for
a library. ICU 2.0 supports this with a new function <code><a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/apiref/uclean_h.html">u_cleanup()</a></code>
that may be called after an application has released all ICU objects.
<code>u_cleanup()</code> will then release all of ICU's internal memory.
The ICU libraries can then even be unloaded cleanly without shutting down
the process.</p>
<h3>ICU versioning - C++ namespaces</h3>
<p>Beginning with ICU 2.0, multiple releases of ICU can be used in the same
process. Together with an arbitrary number of post-2.0 releases, one
pre-2.0 release can be loaded and active.</p>
<p>This is achieved by renaming all library exports to include a release
number suffix. Each global function and each class is renamed in this way
using a header file with #defines. For C++, if the compiler supports
namespaces, all ICU C++ classes are defined in the "icu" namespace. If the
compiler does not support namespaces, then the classes are renamed instead.
This change also reduces the chance of naming collisions with other
libraries.</p>
<p>For details see the <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/design.html">User's Guide Design
Chapter</a>.</p>
<h3>Data loading changed</h3>
<p>ICU data loading is simplified for most users. By default, the ICU build
creates a DLL/shared library that is linked directly with the common
library (<code>[lib]icuuc</code>). By placing all ICU libraries including
the data library into the same folder, ICU should start up and find its
data immediately. Dynamic loading of data from DLLs/shared libraries is not
supported any more.</p>
<p>Before ICU 2.0, ICU did not itself link directly with its data library,
but some ICU applications did (like the Xerces XML parser) and called
<code>udata_setCommonData()</code>. This is not necessary any more in the
default case.<br>
On the other hand, this same technique can now be used to efficiently load
application data (e.g., for its own localization). An application can build
a data DLL/library of its own, link it, and call the new API
<code>udata_setAppData()</code>.</p>
<p>For details on finding and loading ICU data and on options for portable,
common data files etc. see the <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/icudata.html">User's Guide ICU
Data Chapter</a>.</p>
<h3>Collation improvements</h3>
<p>The performance of Japanese Katakana collation is improved, and the
Japanese collation is changed for conformance with the JIS X 4061 standard.
The improvement is in the handling of the length and iteration marks,
making the processing of regular letters faster.</p>
<p>The JIS X 4061 standard specifies a 5-level sorting algorithm. Sorting
with all five levels according to JIS is achieved in ICU 2.0 with the
"identical" strength. The fifth level distinguishes regular character codes
from compatibility variants.</p>
<p>There is special code to handle the fourth (quarternary) level of the
JIS standard, which distinguishes between Hiragana and Katakana letters. In
ICU 2.0 string comparisons (like ucol_strcoll), when using the "shifted"
option, this is slow because it generates complete sort keys for both
strings. This is not an issue if the "shifted" option is not used, or if
the string comparison is done with fewer levels.</p>
<p>Quarternary strength, without the "shifted" option, is the default for
Japanese collation in ICU 2.0.</p>
<p>Three-level sorting (tertiary strength) and lower — if sufficient
— is faster even with "shifted" on (for string comparisons:
<em>much</em> faster in this case).</p>
<h3>License Change (for ICU 1.8.1 and up)</h3>
<p>The ICU projects (ICU4C and ICU4J) have changed their licenses from the
IPL (IBM Public License) to the X license. The X license is a non-viral and
recommended free software license that is compatible with the GNU GPL
license. This is effective starting with release 1.8.1 of ICU4C and release
1.3.1 of ICU4J. All previous ICU releases will continue to utilize the IPL.
New ICU releases will adopt the X license. The users of previous releases
of ICU will need to accept the terms and conditions of the X license in
order to adopt the new ICU releases.</p>
<p>The main effect of the change is to provide GPL compatibility. The X
license is listed as GPL compatible, see the gnu page at <a href=
"http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses">http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses</a>.</p>
<p>The text of the X license is available at <a href=
"http://www.x.org/terms.htm">http://www.x.org/terms.htm</a>. The IBM
version contains the essential text of the license, omitting the X-specific
trademarks and copyright notices.</p>
<p>For more details please see the <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/press.html">press announcement</a> and the
<a href="http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/project_faq.html#license">Project
FAQ</a>.</p>
<h3>Transliterator improvements</h3>
<p>The transliterator service has undergone an extensive overhaul, in both
the rule-based engine and the built-in system rules. For a complete
description see the <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/Transliteration.html">User's
Guide chapter on transliteration</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li><b>New or rewritten rules:</b> <tt>Any-Accents</tt>,
<tt>Any-Publishing</tt>, <tt>Cyrillic-Latin</tt>*, <tt>Greek-Latin</tt>*,
<tt>Greek-Latin/UNGEGN</tt> (aka <tt>el-Latin</tt>),
<tt>Hiragana-Latin</tt>*, and <tt>Latin-Katakana</tt>*. New algorithmic
rules include <tt>Any-Name</tt>*, the normalization rules
<tt>Any-NFC</tt>, <tt>Any-NFKC</tt>, <tt>Any-NFD</tt>, and
<tt>Any-NFKD</tt>, casing rules <tt>Any-Upper</tt>, <tt>Any-Lower</tt>,
and <tt>Any-Title</tt>. <tt>Unicode-Hex</tt>* has been renamed
<tt>Any-Hex</tt>*. <tt>Any-Remove</tt> deletes its input. [*<em>applies
to reverse rule as well</em>]</li>
<li><b>Indic script rules:</b> Transliterators between Indic scripts and
from each script to and from Latin have been completely revised. Scripts
included are Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam,
Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. Taking Bengali as an example, transliterators
<tt>Bengali-X</tt> and <tt>X-Bengali</tt> exist, where X is any of the
other listed Indic scripts, or Latin.</li>
<li><b>Deleted rules:</b> <tt>UnicodeName-UnicodeChar</tt> has been
replaced by <tt>Any-Name</tt>*. <tt>Latin-Arabic</tt>* and
<tt>Latin-Hebrew</tt>* have been removed until they can be rewritten.
<tt>KeyboardEscape-Latin1</tt> has been replaced by <tt>Any-Accents</tt>
and <tt>Any-Publishing</tt>. <tt>Latin-Kana</tt>* has been replaced by
<tt>Latin-Katakana</tt>* and <tt>Latin-Hiragana</tt>*. [*<em>applies to
reverse rule as well</em>]</li>
<li><b>ID syntax changes:</b> Transliterator IDs ignore case and
whitespace now. They now have the standard form
<em>[filter]source-target/variant</em>. The "<em>[filter]</em>" element
is optional; if present, it limits the characters that the transliterator
operates on. The "<em>source-</em>" element is optional; if omitted, it
is taken to be <tt>Any</tt>. The "<em>/variant</em>" element is also
optional; if present, it selects between different flavors of a related
set of transliterators, for example, <tt>Greek-Latin</tt> and
<tt>Greek-Latin/UNGEGN</tt>. The source, target, and variant specifiers
are case-insensitive strings of the form
<tt>/[_[:L:]][_[:L:][:N:]]*/</tt>.</li>
<li>
<b>Locale support:</b> The source, target, or both may be locales. In
this case the transliterator rules will be looked up in the system
locale resource bundles. Rules are sought under three tags, listed
below. The text after the underscore in each tag is always
canonicalized to uppercase before lookup. <em>Note: The underscore is
currently omitted from ICU4C tags, but will be restored when
possible.</em>
<ul>
<li><tt>TransliterateTo_<em>SCRIPT</em></tt>: Unidirectional rules
from the enclosing locale to another script or specifier.</li>
<li><tt>TransliterateFrom_<em>SCRIPT</em></tt>: Unidirectional rules
from another script or specifier to the enclosing locale.</li>
<li><tt>Transliterate_<em>SCRIPT</em></tt>: Bidirectional rules, with
the forward direction being To and the reverse direction being
From.</li>
</ul>
Lookup proceeds in the following order:
<ul>
<li>In the dynamic registry: <em>source-target</em></li>
<li>In the <em>source</em> locale:
<tt>TransliterateTo_<em>TARGET</em></tt> then
<tt>Transliterate_<em>TARGET</em></tt> (forward direction)</li>
<li>In the <em>target</em> locale:
<tt>TransliterateFrom_<em>SOURCE</em></tt> then
<tt>Transliterate_<em>SOURCE</em></tt> (reverse direction)</li>
</ul>
If either the source or target specifier is not a locale then the
corresponding locale lookup is skipped. If either is a locale, then
locale fallback from <tt>aa_BB_CCC</tt> to <tt>aa_BB</tt> to
<tt>aa</tt> is performed (where <tt>aa</tt>, <tt>BB</tt>, and
<tt>CCC</tt> are the locale language, country, and variant). The final
fallback is from the specifier, whether it is a locale or not (e.g.,
script abbreviation), to the long script name associated with that
specifier. If a tag lookup succeeds, the attached element should be a
string array of <i>2n</i> items where <i>n</i> >= 1. Each pair of
strings is a variant name and rule string. The variants are matched
against the requested variant. If no variant is specified then the
first variant is considered to match.
</li>
<li><b>Filters on compounds IDs:</b> A filter on a compound
transliterator can now be specified by giving a leading entry that
contains a filter and no transliterator ID. For example, "<tt>[abc];
Latin-Katakana; Katakana-Hiragana</tt>" submits only the characters
contained in the UnicodeSet <tt>[abc]</tt> to the compound transliterator
<tt>Latin-Katakana; Katakana-Hiragana</tt>.</li>
<li><b>Explicit reverse IDs:</b> Typically if a transliterator
<tt>A-B</tt> is formed, and its inverse is requested, the system tries to
create <tt>B-A</tt>. That is, the source and target are exchanged. In
some cases, the user may wish a different transliterator to be considered
the reverse. In order to do this, the reverse ID is specified in
parentheses immediately following the ID. For example, "<tt>A-B
(B-C)</tt>" is a transliterator <tt>A-B</tt> whose inverse is
<tt>B-C</tt>. If the ID of the inverse is requested, "<tt>B-C (A-B)</tt>"
is returned. The forward or reverse component may be empty, so
"<tt>(B-C)</tt>" and "<tt>A-B()</tt>" are legal IDs with <tt>Null</tt>
transliterator for the forward and reverse direction, respectively. This
is most useful in compounds where one element has no inverse or where a
different inverse from the standard inverse is desired. For example,
"<tt>Any-Lower(); Latin-Cyrillic</tt>".</li>
<li><b>Quantifiers:</b> Transliterator rules may now contain quantifiers
'<tt>*</tt>', '<tt>+</tt>', and '<tt>?</tt>'. These indicate zero or
more, one or more, and zero or one matches, respectively. Quantifiers
apply to the last element, be it a single character, a UnicodeSet, a
segment definition, or a quote; the entire preceding element is repeated.
Quantifiers are implemented as greedy, non-backtracking matchers, unlike
their typical implementation in regular expressions. As a result,
expressions that match in a traditional regular expression engine (e.g.,
Perl) will not match in transliterator. E.g., "[a-z]+ q > x;" will
<em>not</em> match "abcq", since the '<tt>+</tt>' quantifier consumes all
four characters.</li>
<li><b>Dot character:</b> A new special character is recognized in rules,
'<tt>.</tt>' (U+0020). This character matches any characters in the set
<tt>[^[:Zp:][:Zl:]\r\n$]</tt>. Note the trailing '<tt>$</tt>' in the set
pattern, which indicates that the ETHER character is <em>not</em> matched
by '<tt>.</tt>'.</li>
<li><b>::ID blocks in rules:</b> Transliterator IDs may now be included
in rule sets. These may occur in two locations: as one contiguous block
before any other rules, and as one contiguous block after all rules. The
effect of placing <tt>::ID</tt>s into a rule set is to enclose the
rule-based transliterator within a compound transliterator containing the
indicated IDs. The <tt>::ID</tt> syntax is exactly the same as the
standard ID syntax, with the difference that each ID element is preceded
by the special token "<tt>::</tt>".</li>
<li><b>Segment definitions more flexible:</b> Segment definitions may be
nested and are now unlimited in number. Prior to 2.0, segments could not
be nested and were limited to nine ($1 to $9).</li>
<li><b>Variable range pragma:</b> A new pragma is supported. This follows
the syntax:<code>use variable range 0xE800 0xEFFF;</code> (Any two code
points may be specified.) The code points are specified as decimal
constants, octal constants with a leading '0', or hexadecimal constants
with a leading "0x". The given range is used internally for stand-in
characters during processing. The default range is <b>0xF000..0xF8FF</b>.
If a rule set explicitly uses characters in the default variable range, a
new range, not containing any characters in use in the rule set, must be
specified. <em>Note:</em> This is the first of several planned
pragmas.</li>
<li><b>Factory method registration:</b> Factory methods (function
pointers in ICU4C; functor objects in ICU4J) may be registered against
transliterator IDs. This is generally more efficient than the
registration of singleton prototypes, since no actual transliterator
object need be created until the user requires one. See the
<tt>registerFactory()</tt> method in <tt>Transliterator</tt>.</li>
<li><b>Filtering semantics changed for subclasses:</b> Subclasses now
need not concern themselves with filters. Instead, they may assume that
all characters received by <tt>handleTransliterate()</tt> have already
passed through the filter. This simplifies subclass code greatly.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a name="NewsUnicodeSet">UnicodeSet Improvements</a></h3>
<ul>
<li><b><tt>[:Any:]</tt> set:</b> The set <tt>[:Any:]</tt> matches all
Unicode code points, that is, U+0000..U+10FFFF.</li>
<li><b><tt>\p{}</tt> syntax:</b> UnicodeSet now recognizes a Perlish
syntax for character properties. Any property designated as
<tt>[:Foo:]</tt> may equivalently be designated <tt>\p{Foo}</tt>.</li>
<li><b>Short, medium, and long property names:</b> In addition to the
short property names, such as <tt>[:Ll:]</tt>, equivalent medium (e.g.,
<tt>[:gc=Ll:]</tt>) and long (e.g.,
<tt>[:GeneralCategory=LowercaseLetter:]</tt>) forms are recognized. See
the <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/~checkout~/icuhtml/design/unicodeset_properties.html">
UnicodeSet Properties design document</a> for details. As of this
release, general categories, numeric value, and script are
supported.</li>
</ul>
<hr>
<h2><a name="Download" href="#Download">How to Download the Source
Code</a></h2>
<p>There are two ways to download ICU releases:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Official Release Snapshot:</strong><br>
If you want to use ICU (as opposed to developing it), you should
download an official packaged version of the ICU source code. These
versions are tested more thoroughly than day-to-day development builds of
the system, and they are packaged in zip and tar files for convenient
download. These packaged files can be found at <a href=
"http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/">http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/</a>.<br>
The packaged snapshots are named <strong>icu-nnnn.zip</strong> or
<strong>icu-nnnn.tgz</strong>, where nnnn is the version number. The .zip
file is used for Windows platforms, while the .tgz file is preferred on
most other platforms.<br>
Please unzip this file. It will reconstruct the source directory,
including anonymous CVS control directories (see below).</li>
<li><strong>CVS Source Repository:</strong><br>
If you are interested in developing features, patches, or bug fixes for
ICU, you should probably be working with the latest version of the ICU
source code. You will need to check the code out of our CVS repository to
ensure that you have the most recent version of all of the files. See our
<a href="http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/develop/cvs.html">CVS page</a>
for details.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="SourceCode" href="#SourceCode">ICU Source Code
Organization</a></h2>
<p>In the descriptions below, <strong><i><ICU></i></strong> is the
full path name of the icu directory - the top level directory from the
distribution archives - in your file system.</p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" width="100%" summary="">
<caption>
The following files describe the code drop.
</caption>
<tr>
<td>readme.html</td>
<td>Describes the International Components for Unicode (this file)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>license.html</td>
<td>Contains the text of the ICU license</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><br>
</p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" width="100%" summary="">
<caption>
The following directories contain source code and data files.
</caption>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>common</b>/
</td>
<td>
The core Unicode and support functionality, such as resource bundles,
character properties, locales, codepage conversion, normalization, Unicode
properties, Locale, and UnicodeString.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>i18n</b>/
</td>
<td>
Modules in i18n are generally the more data-driven, that is to say
resource bundle driven, components. These deal with higher level internationalization
issues such as formatting, collation, text break analysis, and transliteration.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>data</b>
</td>
<td>This directory contains the source data in text format which is compiled
into binary form during the ICU build process. It contains several subdirectories,
in which the data files are grouped by function. Note that the build process
must be run again after any changes are made to this directory.
<ul>
<li>
<b>brkitr/</b> <b> </b>Data files for character, word, sentence,
title casing and line boundary analysis.
</li>
<li>
<b>locales/</b> These .txt files contain ICU language and culture-specific
localization data. Two special bundles are <b>root</b>, which is the fallback
data and parent of other bundles, and <b>index</b> which contains a list
of installed bundles. The makefile <b>resfiles.mk</b> contains the list
of resource bundle files.
</li>
<li>
<b>mappings/</b> Here are the <b>code page converter tables,</b>
.ucm files containing mappings to and from Unicode. These are compiled
into .cnv files. <b>convrtrs.txt</b> is the alias mapping table from various
converter name formats to ICU internal format and vice versa. It produces
cnvalias.dat. The makefiles which contain the list of converters to be
built are <b>ucmfiles.mk, ucmcore.mk, </b>and <b>ucmebcdic.mk.</b>
</li>
<li>
<b>translit/ </b> This directory contains Transliterator rules
as resource bundles, a makefile <b>trnsfiles.mk</b> containing the list
of installed system translitaration files, and as well the special bundle
<b>translit_index</b>
which lists the system transliterator aliases.
</li>
<li>
<b>unidata/</b> This directory contains the Unicode data files. Please
see <a href="http://www.unicode.org/">http://www.unicode.org/</a> for more
information.
</li>
<li>
<b>misc/</b> The misc directory contains other data files which did
not fit into the above categories. Currently it only contains <b>timezone.txt,</b>
a generated file which is compiled into tz.dat, and containing time zone
information.
</li>
<li>
<b>out/ </b>This directory contains the assembled memory mapped files.
</li>
<li>
<b>out/build </b>This directory contains intermediate (compiled) files,
such as .cnv, .res, etc.
</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/test/<b>intltest</b>/
</td>
<td>
A test suite including all C++ APIs. For information about running
the test suite, see the users' guide.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/test/<b>cintltst</b>/
</td>
<td>
A test suite written in C, including all C APIs. For information about
running the test suite, see the users' guide.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/test/<b>testdata</b>
</td>
<td>
Source text files for data which is read by the tests. It contains
the subdirectories <b>out/build/</b> which is used for intermediate files,
and <b>out/ </b>which contains the files <b>test1.cnv</b> through <b>test4.cnv,</b>
and <b>testdata.dat.</b> Note that the tests call u_setDataDirectory("<ICU>/source/test/testdata/lib"),
so that ICU will load these files as if they were part of the ICU data
package, for testing purposes. This was formerly accomplished by setting
the ICU_DATA environment variable to point at these files. ICU_DATA should
not be set under normal circumstances.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>tools</b>
</td>
<td>
Tools for generating the data files. Data files are generated by invoking
<i><ICU></i>/source/data/build/makedata.bat
on Win32 or <i><ICU></i>/source/make on Unix.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>samples</b>
</td>
<td>
Various sample programs that use ICU
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>extra</b>
</td>
<td>
Non-supported API additions. Currently, it contains the 'ustdio' file
i/o library
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>layout</b>
</td>
<td>
Contains the ICU layout engine (not a rasterizer).
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/<b>packaging</b>
<br><i><ICU></i>/<b>debian</b>
</td>
<td>
These directories contain scripts and tools for packaging the final
ICU build for various release platforms.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>config</b>
</td>
<td>
Contains helper makefiles for platform specific build commands. Used
by 'configure'.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<i><ICU></i>/source/<b>allinone</b>
</td>
<td>
Contains top-level ICU project files, for instance to build all of
ICU under one MSVC project.
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<!-- end of ICU structure ==================================== -->
<h2><a name="HowToBuild" href="#HowToBuild">How To Build And Install
ICU</a></h2>
<h3><a name="HowToBuildSupported" href="#HowToBuildSupported">Supported
Platforms</a></h3>
<table border="1" cellpadding="3" summary="">
<caption>
Here is a status of functionality of ICU on several different
platforms.
</caption>
<tr>
<th>Operating system</th>
<th>Compiler</th>
<th>Testing frequency</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Windows 98/NT/2000</td>
<td>Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0</td>
<td>Reference platform</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Red Hat Linux 6.1</td>
<td>gcc 2.95.2</td>
<td>Reference platform</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>AIX 4.3.3</td>
<td>xlC 3.6.4</td>
<td>Reference platform</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Solaris 2.6</td>
<td>Workshop Pro CC 4.2</td>
<td>Reference platform</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HP/UX 11.01</td>
<td>aCC A.12.10</td>
<td>Reference platform</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>AIX 5.1.0 L</td>
<td>Visual Age C++ 5.0</td>
<td>Regularly tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Solaris 2.7</td>
<td>Workshop Pro CC 6.0</td>
<td>Regularly tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Solaris 2.6</td>
<td>gcc 2.91.66</td>
<td>Regularly tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>FreeBSD 4.4</td>
<td>gcc 2.95.3</td>
<td>Regularly tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HP/UX 11.01</td>
<td>CC A.03.10</td>
<td>Regularly tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>OS/390 (zSeries)</td>
<td>CC r10</td>
<td>Regularly tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>AS/400 (iSeries) V5R1</td>
<td>iCC</td>
<td>Rarely tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NetBSD, OpenBSD</td>
<td> </td>
<td>Rarely tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SGI/IRIX</td>
<td> </td>
<td>Rarely tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>PTX</td>
<td> </td>
<td>Rarely tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>OS/2</td>
<td>Visual Age</td>
<td>Rarely tested</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Macintosh</td>
<td> </td>
<td>Needs help to port</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><strong>Key to testing frequency</strong></p>
<dl>
<dt><i>Reference platform</i></dt>
<dd>ICU will work on these platforms with these compilers</dd>
<dt><i>Regularly tested</i></dt>
<dd>ICU should work on these platforms with these compilers</dd>
<dt><i>Rarely tested</i></dt>
<dd>ICU has been ported to these platforms but may not have been tested
there recently</dd>
</dl>
<h3><a name="HowToBuildWindows" href="#HowToBuildWindows">How To Build And
Install On Windows</a></h3>
<p>Building International Components for Unicode requires:</p>
<ul>
<li>Microsoft NT 4.0 and above, or Windows 98 and above</li>
<li>Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 (Service Pack 2 is required to work with the
release build of max speed optimization).</li>
</ul>
<p>The steps are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Unzip the icu-XXXX.zip file into any convenient location. Using
command line zip, type "unzip -a icu-XXXX.zip -d drive:\directory", or
just use WinZip.</li>
<li>Be sure that the ICU binary directory, <i><ICU></i>\bin\, is
included in the <strong>PATH</strong> environment variable. The tests
will not work without the location of the ICU dll files in the path.</li>
<li>Set the <strong>TZ</strong> environment variable to
<strong>PST8PDT</strong>. The tests will not work in any other
timezone.</li>
<li>Open the "<i><ICU></i>\source\allinone\allinone.dsw" workspace
file in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. (This workspace includes all the
International Components for Unicode libraries, necessary ICU building
tools, and the intltest and cintltest test suite projects). Please see
the note below if you want to build from the command line instead.</li>
<li>Set the active Project to the "all" project. To do this: Choose
"Project" menu, and select "Set active project". In the submenu, select
the "all" workspace.</li>
<li>Set the active configuration to "Win32 Debug" or "Win32 Release" (See
<a href="#HowToBuildWindowsConfig">note</a> below).</li>
<li>Choose the "Build" menu and select "Rebuild All". If you want to
build the Debug and Release at the same time, see the <a href=
"#HowToBuildWindowsBatch">note</a> below.</li>
<li>Run the C++ test suite, "intltest". To do this: set the active
project to "intltest", and press F5 to run it.</li>
<li>Run the C test suite, "cintltst". To do this: set the active project
to "cintltst", and press F5 to run it.</li>
<li>Make sure that both "cintltst" and "intltest" passed without any
errors. The return codes are non-zero when they do not pass. Visual C++
will display the return codes in the debug tag of the output window. When
"intltest" and "cintltest" return 0, it means that everything is
installed correctly. You can press Ctrl+F5 on the test project to run the
test and see what error messages were displayed (if any tests
failed).</li>
<li>Reset the <strong>TZ</strong> environment variable to its original
value, unless you plan on testing ICU any further.</li>
<li>You are now able to develop applications with ICU.</li>
</ol>
<p><a name="HowToBuildWindowsCommandLine"><strong>Using MSDEV At The
Command Line Note:</strong></a> You can build ICU from the command line.
Assuming that you have properly installed Microsoft Visual C++ to support
command line execution, you can run the following command, 'msdev
<i><ICU></i>\source\allinone\allinone.dsw /MAKE "ALL"'.</p>
<p><a name="HowToBuildWindowsConfig"><strong>Setting Active Configuration
Note:</strong></a> To set the active configuration, two different
possibilities are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Choose "Build" menu, select "Set Active Configuration", and select
"Win32 Release" or "Win32 Debug".</li>
<li>Another way is to select "Customize" in the "Tools" menu, select the
"Toolbars" tab, enable "Build" instead of "Build Minibar", and click on
"Close". This will bring up a toolbar which you can move aside the other
permanent toolbars at the top of the MSVC window. The advantage is that
you now have an easy-to-reach pop-up menu that will always show the
currently selected active configuration. Or, you can drag the project and
configuration selections and drop them on the menu bar for later
selection.</li>
</ul>
<p><a name="HowToBuildWindowsBatch"><strong>Batch Configuration
Note:</strong></a> If you want to build the Debug and Release
configurations at the same time, choose "Build" menu and select "Batch
Build..." instead (and mark all configurations as checked), then click the
button named "Rebuild All". The "all" workspace will build all the test
programs as well as the tools for generating binary locale data files. The
"makedata" project will be run automatically to convert the locale data
files from text format into icudata.dll.</p>
<h3><a name="HowToBuildUnix" href="#HowToBuildUnix">How To Build And
Install On Unix</a></h3>
<p>Building International Components for Unicode on Unix requires:</p>
<p>A UNIX C++ compiler, (gcc, cc, xlc_r, etc...) installed on the target
machine. A recent version of GNU make (3.7+). For a list of OS/390 tools
please view the <a href="#HowToBuildOS390">OS/390 build section</a> of this
document for further details.</p>
<p>The steps are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Decompress the icuXXXX.tar (or icuXXXX.tgz) file. For example,
<tt>gunzip -d < icuXXXX.tgz | tar xvf -</tt></li>
<li>Change directory to the "icu/source".</li>
<li>chmod +x runConfigureICU install-sh</li>
<li>Run the <a href="source/runConfigureICU">runConfigureICU</a> script
for your platform. If you are not using the runConfigureICU script or
your platform is not supported by the script, you need to set your CC,
CXX, CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS environment variables, and type "./configure".
You can type "./configure --help" to print the available options.</li>
<li>Type "gmake" to compile the libraries and all the data files.</li>
<li>
Optionally, type "gmake check" to verify the test suite.
<ul>
<li>
<b>Note:</b> You may have to set certain variables if you with to
run test programs individually, that is apart from "make check".
The <strong>TZ</strong> environment variable needs to be set to
<strong>PST8PDT</strong>. Also, the environment variable
<strong>ICU_DATA</strong> must be set to the full pathname of the
data directory, to indicate where the locale data files and
conversion mapping tables are. The trailing "/" is required after
the directory name (e.g. "$Root/source/data/" will work, but the
value "$Root/source/data" is not acceptable).
<p>When running samples or other applications, ICU_DATA only needs
to be set if the data is not installed (such as via 'make install')
into the default location.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Type "gmake install" to install.</li>
</ol>
<p>Some platforms use package management tools to control the installation
and uninstallation of files on the system, as well as the integrity of the
system configuration. You may want to check if ICU can be packaged for your
package management tools by looking into the "packaging" directory. (Please
note that if you are using a snapshot of ICU from CVS, it is probable that
the packaging scripts or related files are not up to date with the contents
of ICU at this time, so use them with caution.)</p>
<h3><a name="HowToBuildOS390" href="#HowToBuildOS390">OS/390 (zSeries)
Platform</a></h3>
<p>If you are building on the OS/390 UNIX System Services platform, it is
important that you understand a few details:</p>
<ul>
<li>The gnu utilities gmake and gzip/gunzip are needed and can be
obtained for OS/390 from <a href=
"http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/unix/bpxa1ty1.html#opensrc">
z/OS Unix - Tools and Toys</a>. Documentation on these tools can be found
at the <a href=
"http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg245944.html">
Open Source Software for OS/390 UNIX</a> Red Book.</li>
<li>Encoding considerations: The source code assumes that it is compiled
with codepage ibm-1047 (to be exact, the UNIX System Services variant of
it). The pax command converts all of the source code files from ASCII to
codepage ibm-1047 (USS) EBCDIC. However, some files are binary files and
must not be converted, or must be converted back to their original state.
You can use the <a href="as_is/os390/unpax-icu.sh">unpax-icu.sh</a>
script to do this for you automatically. It will unpackage the tar file
and convert all the necessary files for you automatically.
<!--The files that must not be converted to ibm-1047 are the
following:
<ul>
<li>All UTF-8 files</li>
<li>icu/data/*.brk</li>
<li>icu/source/test/testdata/uni-text.bin</li>
<li>icu/source/test/testdata/th18057.txt</li>
</ul>
Such a conversion can be done using iconv:<br>
<code>iconv -f IBM-1047 -t ISO8859-1 uni-text.bin >
uni-text.bin</code-->
</li>
<li>
<p>OS/390 supports both native S/390 hexadecimal floating point and,
(with Version 2.6 and later) IEEE binary floating point. This is a
compile time option. Applications built with IEEE should use ICU dlls
that are built with IEEE (and vice versa). The environment variable
IEEE390=1 will cause the OS/390 version of ICU to be built with IEEE
floating point. The default is native hexadecimal floating point.<br>
<em>Important:</em> Currently (ICU 1.4.2), native floating point
support is sufficient for codepage conversion, resource bundle and
UnicodeString operations, but the Format APIs, especially ChoiceFormat,
require IEEE binary floating point.</p>
<p>Examples for configuring ICU:<br>
Debug build: <code>IEEE390=1 ./runConfigureICU --enable-debug
zOS/cxx</code><br>
Release build: <code>IEEE390=1 ./runConfigureICU zOS/cxx</code></p>
</li>
<li>Since the default make on OS/390 is not gmake, the pkgdata tool
requires that the "make" command is aliased to your installed version of
gmake.</li>
<li>The makedep executable that is used with the OS/390 ICU build process
is not shipped with ICU. It is available at the <a href=
"http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/unix/bpxa1ty1.html#opensrc">
z/OS Unix - Tools and Toys</a> site. The PATH environment variable should
be updated to contain the location of this executable prior to build.
Alternatively, makedep may be moved into an existing PATH directory.</li>
<li>
To run all of the tests for ICU, use "gmake check". When running
individual tests of the test suite, the TZ environment variable should
be set to export TZ="PST8PDT" so that time zone comparisons are
correct. Building and testing ICU without using gmake requires that the
ICU libraries in the LIBPATH. In other words, the LIBPATH should
contain (each path prepended with the root directory that contains the
icu directory):
<ul>
<li>icu/source/common</li>
<li>icu/source/data</li>
<li>icu/source/i18n</li>
<li>icu/source/tools/ctestfw</li>
<li>icu/source/tools/toolutil</li>
<li>icu/source/extra/ustdio</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>OS/390 Batch (PDS) support</h4>
<p>By default, ICU builds its libraries into the HFS. However, there is a
390-specific switch to build some libraries into PDS files. The switch is
the environmental variable OS390BATCH, and if set, the following libraries
are built into PDS files: libicuuc<i>XX</i>.dll, libicudt<i>XX</i>e.dll,
libicudt<i>XX</i>e_390.dll, and libtestdata.dll. Turning on OS390BATCH does
not turn off the normal HFS build, thus the HFS dlls will always be
created.</p>
<p>The names of the PDS files are determined by the value of the
environmental variables LOADMOD and LOADEXP. These variables must contain
the target PDS names whenever the OS390BATCH variable is set. LOADMOD is
the library (.dll) target dataset and LOADEXP is the side deck (.x) target
dataset.</p>
<p>The PDS member names are as follows:</p>
<pre>
<samp>IXMI<i>XX</i>UC --> libicuuc<i>XX</i>.dll
IXMI<i>XX</i>DA --> libicudt<i>XX</i>e.dll
IXMI<i>XX</i>D1 --> libicudt<i>XX</i>e_390.dll</samp>
</pre>
<p>Example PDS attributes are as follows:</p>
<pre>
<samp>Data Set Name . . . : <i>USER</i>.ICU.LOAD
General Data
Management class. . : **None**
Storage class . . . : BASE
Volume serial . . . : TSO007
Device type . . . . : 3390
Data class. . . . . : LOAD
Organization . . . : PO
Record format . . . : U
Record length . . . : 0
Block size . . . . : 32760
1st extent cylinders: 40
Secondary cylinders : 59
Data set name type : PDS
Data Set Name . . . : <i>USER</i>.ICU.EXP
General Data
Management class. . : **None**
Storage class . . . : BASE
Volume serial . . . : TSO007
Device type . . . . : 3390
Data class. . . . . : **None**
Organization . . . : PO
Record format . . . : FB
Record length . . . : 80
Block size . . . . : 3200
1st extent cylinders: 3
Secondary cylinders : 3
Data set name type : PDS</samp>
</pre>
<h3><a name="HowToBuildOS400" href="#HowToBuildOS400">OS/400 (iSeries)
Platform</a></h3>
<p>ICU Reference Release 1.8.1 contains partial support for the 400
platform, but additional work by the user is currently needed to get it to
build properly. A future release of ICU should work out-of-the-box under
OS/400.</p>
<ul>
<li>
Requirements:
<ul>
<li>QSHELL interpreter installed (install base option 30, operating
system)</li>
<!--li>QShell Utilities, PRPQ 5799-XEH (not required for V4R5)</li-->
<li>ILE C/C++ Compiler for iSeries, LPP 5722-WDS</li>
<li>The latest GNU facilities (You can get the GNU facilities for
OS/400 from <a href=
"http://www.as400.ibm.com/developer/porting/gnu_utilities.html">http://www.as400.ibm.com/developer/porting/gnu_utilities.html</a>).
Older versions may not work properly.</li>
</ul>
<!-- end requirements -->
</li>
<li>
Build environment setup:
<ol>
<li>
Create AS400 target library. This library will be the target for
the resulting modules, programs and service programs. You will
specify this library on the OUTPUTDIR environment variable in step
2.<br>
<pre>
<samp>CRTLIB LIB(<i>libraryname</i>)</samp>
</pre>
<br>
</li>
<li>
Set up the following environment variables in your build process
(use the <i>libraryname</i> from the previous step)
<pre>
<samp>ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(ICU_DATA) VALUE('/icu/source/data')
ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(CC) VALUE('/usr/bin/icc')
ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(CXX) VALUE('/usr/bin/icc')
ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(MAKE) VALUE('/usr/bin/gmake')
ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(OUTPUTDIR) VALUE('<i>libraryname</i>')</samp>
</pre>
<i>libraryname</i> identifies target as400 library for *module,
*pgm and *srvpgm objects.<br>
<br>
</li>
<!--li>Add QCXXN, to your build process library list. This results in
the resolution of CRTCPPMOD used by the icc compiler</li-->
<li>
In order to get the tests to run correctly, the QUTCOFFSET needs to
be set to the Pacific Time Zone offset.<br>
<br>
To check your QUTCOFFSET:
<pre>
<samp>DSPSYSVAL SYSVAL(QUTCOFFSET)</samp>
</pre>
<br>
To change your QUTCOFFSET:<br>
<pre>
<samp>CHGSYSVAL SYSVAL(QUTCOFFSET) VALUE('-0800')</samp>
</pre>
You should change -0800 to -0700 for daylight savings.<br>
<br>
</li>
<li>Run 'CHGJOB CCSID(37)'</li>
<li>Run 'QSH'</li>
<li>Run gunzip on the ICU source code compressed tar archive
(icu-<i>X</i>-<i>Y</i>.tar.gz or icu-<i>X</i>-<i>Y</i>.tgz).</li>
<li>Run unpax-icu.sh on the tar file from the ICU download page.</li>
<li>Change your current directory to icu/source.</li>
<li>Run 'as_is/os400/configure --host=as400-os400
--with-data-packaging=archive'</li>
<li>Run 'gmake -e'. The '-e' option is needed to pickup the
compilers.</li>
<li>Run 'gmake -e check' to run the tests.</li>
</ol>
<!-- end build environment -->
</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="ImportantNotes" href="#ImportantNotes">Important Notes About
Using ICU</a></h2>
<h3><a name="ImportantNotesWindows" href="#ImportantNotesWindows">Windows
Platform</a></h3>
<p>If you are building on the Win32 platform, it is important that you
understand a few of the following build details.</p>
<h4>DLL directories and the PATH setting</h4>
<p>As delivered, the International Components for Unicode build as several
DLLs which are placed in the "<i><ICU></i>\bin" directory. You must
add this directory to the PATH environment variable in your system, or any
executables you build will not be able to access International Components
for Unicode libraries. Alternatively, you can copy the DLL files into a
directory already in your PATH, but we do not recommend this. You can wind
up with multiple copies of the DLL and wind up using the wrong one.</p>
<h4><a name="ImportantNotesWindowsPath">Changing your PATH</a></h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Windows 2000</strong>: Use the System Icon in the Control
Panel. Pick the "Advanced" tab. Select the "Environment Variables..."
button. Select the variable PATH in the lower box, and select the lower
"Edit..." button. In the "Variable Value" box, append the string
";<i><ICU></i>\bin" to the end of the path string. If there is
nothing there, just type in "<i><ICU></i>\bin". Click the Set
button, then the OK button.</li>
<li><strong>Windows NT</strong>: Use the System Icon in the Control
Panel. Pick the "Environment" tab, and select the variable PATH in the
lower box. In the "value" box, append the string
";<i><ICU></i>\bin" at the end of the path string. If there is
nothing there, just type in "<i><ICU></i>\bin". Click the Set
button, then the OK button.</li>
<li><strong>Windows 95/98/ME</strong>: Edit the autoexec.bat, and add the
following line to the end of file, "SET
PATH=%PATH%;<i><ICU></i>\bin"</li>
</ul>
<p>Note: when packaging a Windows application for distribution and
installation on user systems, copies of the ICU dlls should be included
with the application, and installed for exclusive use by the application.
This is the only way to insure that your app is running with the same
version of ICU, built with exactly the same options, that you developed and
tested with. Refer to Microsoft's guidelines on the usage of dlls, or
search for the phrase "dll hell" on <a href=
"http://msdn.microsoft.com/">msdn.microsoft.com</a>.</p>
<h4>Linking with Runtime libraries</h4>
<p>All the DLLs link with the C runtime library "Debug Multithreaded DLL"
or "Multithreaded DLL." (This is changed through the Project Settings
dialog, on the C/C++ tab, under Code Generation.) It is important that any
executable or other DLL you build which uses the International Components
for Unicode DLLs links with these runtime libraries as well. If you do not
do this, you will get random memory errors when you run the executable.<br>
</p>
<h3><a name="ImportantNotesUnix" href="#ImportantNotesUnix">Unix Type
Platform</a></h3>
<p>If you are building on a Unix platform, it is important that you add the
location of your ICU libraries (including the data library) to your
LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. The ICU libraries may not link or
load properly without doing this.</p>
<h3><a name="ImportantNotesDefaultCP" href="#ImportantNotesDefaultCP">Using
the default codepage</a></h3>
<p>ICU has code to determine the default codepage of the system or process.
This default codepage can be used to convert <code>char *</code> strings to
and from Unicode.</p>
<p>Depending on system design, setup and APIs, it may not always be
possible to find a default codepage that fully works as expected. For
example,</p>
<ul>
<li>On Windows there are three encodings in use at the same time. Unicode
(UTF-16) is always used inside of Windows, while for <code>char *</code>
encodings there are two classes, called "ANSI" and "OEM" codepages. ICU
will use the ANSI codepage. Note that the OEM codepage is used by default
for console window output.</li>
<li>On some Unix-type systems, non-standard names are used for encodings,
or non-standard encodings are used altogether. Although ICU supports 200
encodings in its standard build and many more aliases for them, it will
not be able to recognize such non-standard names.</li>
<li>Some systems do not have a notion of a system or process codepage,
and may not have APIs for that.</li>
</ul>
<p>If you have means of detecting a default codepage name that are more
appropriate for your application, then you should set that name with
<code>ucnv_setDefaultName()</code> as the first ICU function call. This
makes sure that the internally cached default converter will be
instantiated from your preferred name.</p>
<p>Starting in ICU 2.0, when a converter for the default codepage cannot be
opened, a fallback default codepage name and converter will be used. On
most platforms, this will be US-ASCII. For OS/390 (z/OS), ibm-1047-s390 is
the default fallback codepage. For AS/400 (iSeries), ibm-37 is the default
fallback codepage. This default fallback codepage is used when the
operating system is using a non-standard name for a default codepage, or
the converter was not packaged with ICU. The feature allows ICU to run in
unusual computing environments without completely failing.</p>
<h3><a name="ImportantNotesDeprecatedAPI" href=
"#ImportantNotesDeprecatedAPI">Methods for enabling deprecated
APIs</a></h3>
<h4>C</h4>
<p>Some deprecated C APIs can be enabled without recompiling the ICU
libraries. This can be achieved by defining certain symbols before
including the ICU header files. For example, to enable deprecated C APIs
for formatting.</p>
<pre>
<samp>#ifndef U_USE_DEPRECATED_FORMAT_API
# define U_USE_DEPRECATED_FORMAT_API 1
#endif
#include "unicode/udat.h"
int main(){
UDateFormat *def, *fr, *fr_pat ;
UErrorCode status = U_ZERO_ERROR;
UChar temp[30];
fr = udat_open(UDAT_FULL, UDAT_DEFAULT, "fr_FR", NULL,0, &status);
if(U_FAILURE(status)){
printf("Error creating the french dateformat using full time style\n %s\n",
myErrorName(status) );
}
/* This is supposed to open default date format,
but later on it treats it like it is "en_US".
This is very bad when you try to run the tests
on a machine where the default locale is NOT "en_US"
*/
def = udat_open(UDAT_SHORT, UDAT_SHORT, "en_US", NULL, 0, &status);
if(U_FAILURE(status)){
.... /* handle the error */
}
}</samp>
</pre>
<h4>C++</h4>
<p>Deprecated C++ APIs cannot be enabled without recompiling ICU libraries.
Every service has a specific symbol that should be defined to enable the
deprecated API of that service. For example: To enable deprecated APIs in
Transliteration service, the U_USE_DEPRECATED_TRANSLITERATOR_API symbol
should be defined before compiling ICU.</p>
<h2><a name="PlatformDependencies" href="#PlatformDependencies">Platform
Dependencies</a></h2>
<p>The platform dependencies have been mostly isolated into the following
files in the common library. This information can be useful if you are
porting ICU to a new platform.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<strong>unicode/platform.h.in</strong> (autoconf'ed platforms)<br>
<strong>unicode/p<i>XXXX</i>.h</strong> (others: pwin32.h, pmacos.h,
..): Platform-dependent typedefs and defines:<br>
<br>
<ul>
<li>XP_CPLUSPLUS for C++ only.</li>
<li>TRUE and FALSE, UBool, int8_t, int16_t etc.</li>
<li>U_EXPORT and U_IMPORT for specifying dynamic library import and
export</li>
</ul>
<br>
</li>
<li>
<strong>unicode/putil.h, putil.c</strong>: platform-dependent
implementations of various functions that are platform dependent:<br>
<br>
<ul>
<li>uprv_isNaN, uprv_isInfinite, uprv_getNaN and uprv_getInfinity for
handling special floating point values.</li>
<li>uprv_tzset, uprv_timezone, uprv_tzname and time for getting
platform specific time and timezone information.</li>
<li>u_getDataDirectory for getting the default data directory.</li>
<li>uprv_getDefaultLocaleID for getting the default locale
setting.</li>
<li>uprv_getDefaultCodepage for getting the default codepage
encoding.</li>
</ul>
<br>
</li>
<li>
<strong>umutex.h, umutex.c</strong>: Code for doing synchronization in
multithreaded applications. If you wish to use International Components
for Unicode in a multithreaded application, you must provide a
synchronization primitive that the classes can use to protect their
global data against simultaneous modifications. See Users' guide for
more information.<br>
<br>
<ul>
<li>We supply sample implementations for WinNT, Win95, Win98,
Sun/Solaris, RedHat/Linux, HP-UX and for AIX on an RS/6000.</li>
</ul>
<br>
</li>
<li><strong>umapfile.h, umapfile.c</strong>: functions for mapping or
otherwise reading or loading files into memory. All access by ICU to data
from files makes use of these functions.<br>
<br>
</li>
<li>For the Intltest test suite, intltest.cpp in
"icu/source/test/intltest/" contains the method pathnameInContext, which
must also be adapted to any new platform.</li>
<li>Using platform specific #ifdef macros are highly discouraged outside
of the scope of these files. When the source code gets updated in the
future, these #ifdef's can cause testing problems for your platform.</li>
</ul>
<p>It is possible to build each library individually. They must be built in
the following order:<br>
</p>
<ol>
<li>stubdata</li>
<li>common</li>
<li>i18n</li>
<li>toolutil</li>
<li>makeconv</li>
<li>genrb</li>
<li>gentz</li>
<li>genccode</li>
<li>gennames</li>
<li>genuca</li>
<li>gennorm</li>
<li>makedata (a project on Windows, or source/data/Makefile on Unix)</li>
<li>ctestfw, intltest and cintltst, if you want to run the test
suite.</li>
</ol>
<hr>
<p>Copyright © 1997-2002 International Business Machines Corporation
and others. All Rights Reserved.<br>
IBM Globalization Center of Competency - San Jose,<br>
5600 Cottle Road, San José, CA 95193<br>
All rights reserved.</p>
</body>
</html>
