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<title>ReadMe for ICU</title>
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<h2>ReadMe: IBM Classes For Unicode</h2>
<p>Version: 12/28/2000<br>
</p>
<hr>
<p>COPYRIGHT: <br>
Copyright © 1997-1999 International Business Machines Corporation an others. All Rights
Reserved.</p>
<hr>
<p><br>
</p>
<h3><u>Contents</u></h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="#introduction">Introduction</a></li>
<li><a href="#WhatContain">What the IBM Classes for Unicode Contain</a></li>
<li><a href="#API">API overview</a></li>
<li><a href="#PlatformDependencies">Platform Dependencies</a></li>
<li><a href="#ImportantNotes">Important Installation Notes</a></li>
<li><a href="#HowToInstall">How to Install/Build</a></li>
<li><a href="#datahandling">How ICU handles data</a></li>
<li><a href="#CharsetConvert">Character Set Conversion Information</a></li>
<li><a href="#ProgrammingNotes">Programming Notes</a></li>
<li><a href="#WhereToFindMore">Where to Find More Information</a></li>
<li><a href="#SubmittingComments">Submitting Comments, Requesting Features and Reporting
Bugs</a></li>
</ul>
<h3><a NAME="introduction"></a><u>Introduction</u></h3>
<p>Today's software market is a global one in which it is desirable to develop and
maintain one application that supports a wide variety of national languages. IBM Classes
for Unicode provides the following tools to help you write language independent
applications:
<ul>
<li>UnicodeString supporting the Unicode 3.0 standard</li>
<li>Resource bundles for storing and accessing localized information</li>
<li>Number formatters for converting binary numbers into text strings for meaningful display</li>
<li>Date and time formatters for converting internal time data into text strings for
meaningful display</li>
<li>Message formatters for putting together sequences of strings, numbers dates and other
format to create messages</li>
<li>Text collation supporting language sensitive comparison of strings</li>
<li>Text boundary analysis for finding characters, word and sentence boundaries</li>
<li>Changing simple data files rather than modifying program code easily localizes
applications written using these tools</li>
<li>Over 150 locales supported. Visit <a
href="http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/localeexplorer">LocaleExplore
(http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/localeexplorer)</a> site for a
demonstration and a full list of supported locales or <a href="docs/supp_loc.html">click
here for a table of supported locales</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>It is possible to support additional locales by adding more locale data files, with no
code changes. </p>
<p>Please refer to POSIX programmer's Guide for details on what the ISO locale ID means. </p>
<p>Your comments are important to making this release successful. We are committed
to fixing any bugs, and will also use your feedback to help plan future releases. </p>
<blockquote>
<b><u><p>IMPORTANT</u>: Please make sure you understand the <a href="license.html">Copyright
and License information</a>.</b></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p> </p>
</blockquote>
<h3><a NAME="WhatContain"></a><u>What the IBM Classes For Unicode Contain</u></h3>
<p>There are two ways to download the ICU releases,
<ul>
<li><strong>Official Release Snapshot:<br>
</strong>If you want to use ICU (as opposed to developing it), your best bet is to
download an official, packaged ICU 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/developerworks/opensource/icu/project/download/index.html">http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/project/download/index.html</a>.<br>
If packaged snapshot is named <b>ICUXXXXXX.zip </b>, XXXXXX is the release version number.<br>
Please unzip this file. It will re-construct the source directory. </li>
<li><strong>CVS Source Repository:<br>
</strong>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. There are several ways to do this:<ul>
<li>WebCVS:<br>
If you want to browse the code and only make occasional downloads, you may want to use
WebCVS. It provides a convenient, web-based interface for browsing and downloading the
latest version of the ICU source code and documentation. You can also view each file's
revision history, display the differences between individual revisions, determine which
revisions were part of which official release, and so on. </li>
<li>WinCVS:<br>
If you will be doing serious work on ICU, you should probably install a CVS client on your
own machine so that you can do batch operations without going through the WebCVS
interface. On Windows, we suggest the WinCVS client. The following is the example
instruction on how to download ICU via WinCVS: <br>
1.Install the WinCVS client, which you can download from the WinCVS home page. <br>
2.In the WinCVS preferences, specify your CVSRoot to be
":pserver:anoncvs@oss.software.ibm.com:/usr/cvs/icu"<br>
with the password "anoncvs". To enter the CVSRoot value, select
"Preferences" from the "Cvs Admin" pull-down menu.
Authentication should be set to "'passwd' file on the cvs server". <br>
3.To "extract" the most recent version of ICU, select "Checkout
module" from the "Cvs Admin" menu. Specify "icu" for the module
name. </li>
<li>CVS command line:<br>
You can also check out the repository anonymously on UNIX using the following commands,
after first setting your CVSROOT to point to the ICU repository: <br>
<br>
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@oss.software.ibm.com:/usr/cvs/icu<br>
cvs login CVS password: anoncvs<br>
cvs checkout icu<br>
cvs logout</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>For more details on how to download ICU directly from the web site, please also see <a
href="http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/project/download/index.html">http:/oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/project/download/index.html</a></p>
<p>Below, <b>$Root</b> is the placement of the icu directory in your file system, like
"drive:\...\icu" in your environment. "drive:\..." stands for any
drive and any directory on that drive that you chose to install icu into.</p>
<p><b>The following files describe the code drop:</b> <br>
<br>
</p>
<table BORDER="1">
<tr>
<td>readme.html (this file)</td>
<td>describes the IBM Classes for Unicode</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>license.html</td>
<td>contains IBM's public license</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><b>The following directories contain source code and data files:</b> <br>
<br>
</p>
<table BORDER="1" WIDTH="623">
<tr>
<td WIDTH="20%">$Root\source\common\</td>
<td WIDTH="80%">The utility classes, such as ResourceBundle, Unicode, Locale,
UnicodeString. The codepage conversion library API, UnicodeConverter.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td WIDTH="20%">$Root\source\i18n\</td>
<td WIDTH="80%">The collation source files, Collator, RuleBasedCollator and
CollationKey. <br>
The text boundary API, which locates character, word, sentence, and <br>
line breaks. <br>
The format API, which formats and parses data in numeric or date format to and from text.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td WIDTH="20%">$Root\source\test\intltest\</td>
<td WIDTH="80%">A test suite including all C++ APIs. For information about running the
test suite, see <a href="docs/intltest.html">docs\intltest.html</a>.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td WIDTH="20%">$Root\source\test\cintltst\</td>
<td WIDTH="80%">A test suite including all C APIs. For information about running the test
suite, see <a href="docs/cintltst.html">docs\cintltst.html.</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td WIDTH="20%">$Root\data\</td>
<td WIDTH="80%">The Unicode 3.0 data file. Please see <a
href="http://www.unicode.org/">http://www.unicode.org/</a> for more information. <br>
This directory also contains the resource files for all international objects. These
files are of three types: <ul>
<li>TXT files contain general locale data. </li>
<li>RES files contain non-portable locale data files which are generated by the <strong>genrb</strong>
tool.</li>
<li>COL files are non-portable packed binary collation data files which are created by the <strong>gencol</strong>
tool. </li>
<li>UCM files which contain mapping tables {from,to} Unicode in text format</li>
<li>CNV files are non-portable packed binary conversion data generated by the <strong>makeconv</strong>
tool.</li>
<li>icudata.dll file contains data files in a dynamic loadable library format. At this
moment, this file contains CNV files, converter aliases, timezone data and Unicode
character names. Please read <a href="docs/udata.html">udata.html</a> for more
information.</li>
<li>icudata.dat file contains data files in a memory mapped file format. At this moment,
this file contains CNV files, converter aliases, timezone data and Unicode character
names. Please read <a href="docs/udata.html">udata.html</a> for more information.</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td WIDTH="20%">$Root\source\tools</td>
<td WIDTH="80%">Tools for generating the data files. Data files are generated by invoking
$Root\source\tools\makedata.bat on Win32 or $Root\source\make install on Unix.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td WIDTH="20%">$Root\source\samples</td>
<td WIDTH="80%">Various sample programs that use ICU</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p> <b>The following directories are populated when you've built the framework:</b> <br>
(on Unix, replace $Root with the value given to the file "configure") <br>
</p>
<table BORDER="1">
<tr>
<td>$Root\include\</td>
<td>contains all the public header files.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>$output</td>
<td>contains the libraries for static/dynamic linking or executable programs.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><b>The following diagram shows the main directory structure of the IBM Classes for
Unicode:</b> </p>
<pre> icu-NNNN
|
output icu
_____|_____ ______________|______________________________
| | | | | | |
libraries programs include data source | |
(built) (built) (built) | readme.html license.html
|
_________________|__________________________
| | | | | |
common i18n test extra tools samples
| |
___|___ ___|_________________
| | | | | |
intltest cintltst makeconv ctestfw genrb ....</pre>
<h3><a NAME="API"></a><u>API Overview</u></h3>
<p>In the IBM Classes for Unicode, there are two categories:
<ul>
<li>Low-level Unicode/Resource Attributes: (<strong>icuuc</strong> library)<ul>
<li><a href="docs/utilCL.html">Utility Classes</a></li>
<li><a href="docs/conversion_interface.htm">Conversion Interface</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>High-level Unicode Internationalization: (<strong>icui18n</strong> library)<ul>
<li><a href="docs/boundCL.html">Text Boundary Classes</a></li>
<li><a href="docs/collateCL.html">Collation Classes</a></li>
<li><a href="docs/formatCL.html">Formatting Classes</a></li>
<li>Transliterator Classes</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>See IBM<a href="docs/codeConv.html"> Classes for Unicode Code Conventions</a> for a
discussion of code conventions common to all library classes. </p>
<p>See also <a href="html/aindex.html">html/aindex.html</a> for an alphabetical index, and
<a href="html/HIERjava.html">html/HIERjava.html</a> for a hierarchical index to detailed
API documentation. <br>
<br>
</p>
<h3><a NAME="PlatformDependencies"></a><u>Platform Dependencies</u></h3>
<p>The platform dependencies have been isolated into the following 4 files:
<ul>
<li><u>platform.h.in:</u> Platform-dependent typedefs and defines:</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>XP_CPLUSPLUS is defined for C++</li>
<li>bool_t, TRUE and FALSE, int8_t, int16_t etc.</li>
<li>U_EXPORT and U_IMPORT for specifying dynamic library import and export</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><u>putil.c:</u> platform-dependent implementations of various functions that are
platform dependent: (declared in putil.h)</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>icu_isNaN, icu_isInfinite(double), icu_getNaN(); icu_getInfinity for handling special
floating point values</li>
<li>icu_tzset, icu_timezone, icu_tzname and time for reading platform specific time and
timezone information</li>
<li>icu_getDefaultDataDirectory, icu_getDefaultLocaleID for reading the locale setting and
data directory</li>
<li>icu_isBigEndian for finding the endianess of the platform</li>
<li>icu_nextDouble is used specifically by the ChoiceFormat API.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><u>mutex.h and mutex.cpp</u>: Code for doing synchronization in multithreaded
applications. If you wish to use IBM Classes 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 <a href="docs/mutex.html">docs\mutex.html</a>
for more information.</li>
<ul>
<li>We supply sample implementations for WinNT, Win95, Win98, Sun/Solaris, RedHat/Linux,
HP-UX and for AIX on an RS/6000.</li>
<li>If you are changing the platform-dependent files, ptypes.h and putil.h may also be
interesting, but shouldn't have to be changed. If you think any other files than the ones
mentioned above have platform dependencies, please contact us.</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>
</ul>
</ul>
<h3><a NAME="ImportantNotes"></a><b><u>Important Installation Notes </u></b></h3>
<p><strong>Win32 Platform</strong></p>
<p>If you are building on the Win32 platform, it is important that you understand a few
build details: </p>
<p><u>DLL directories and the PATH setting:</u> As delivered, the IBM Classes for Unicode
build as several DLLs. These DLLs are placed in the directories "icu\bin\Debug"
and "icu\bin\Release". You must add either of these directories to the
PATH environment variable in your system, or any executables you build will not be able to
access IBM Classes 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>
<p><u>To change your PATH:</u> Do this under NT by using the System control panel.
Pick the "Environment" tab, select the variable PATH in the lower box. In
the "value" box, append the string ";drive:\...\icu\bin\Debug" at the
end of the path string. If there is nothing there, just type in
"drive:\...\icu\bin\Debug". Click the Set button, then the Ok button. </p>
<p><u>Link with Runtime libraries:</u> 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 IBM Classes for
Unicode DLLs links with these runtime libraries as well. If you do not do this, you will
seemingly get memory errors when you run the executable. <br>
</p>
<p><strong>OS/390 Platform</strong></p>
<p>If you are building on the OS/390 Unix System Servives Platform, it is important that
you understand a<br>
few details. <br>
<br>
The gnu utilities gmake and gzip/gunzip are needed and can be obtained for OS/390 from<br>
www.mks.com. Search for os/390, register, and follow download directions. <br>
<br>
DLL directories and the LIBPATH setting: The ICU dlls libicu-i18n and libicu-uc.dll should
be added<br>
to the LIBPATH environment variable concatenation.<br>
<br>
OS/390 supports both native hexadecimal floating point and, with Version 2.6 and later,
IEEE binary<br>
floating point. This is a compile time option. Applications built with IEEE should use ICU
dlls which are<br>
built with IEEE (and vice versa). The environment variable IEEE390=1 will cause the OS/390
version<br>
of ICU to be built with IEEE floating point. The default is native hexadecimal floating
point. <br>
<br>
The makedep executable is shipped with ICU for use with the OS/390 ICU build process. The
PATH<br>
environment variable should be updated to contain the location of this executable prior to
build.<br>
Alternatively, makedep may be moved into an existing PATH directory.<br>
<br>
When running the test suite, the TZ environment variable should be set to export
TZ="PST8PDT" so<br>
that timezone comparisons are correct.</p>
<h3><a NAME="HowToInstall"></a><u>How to Install/Build on Win NT</u></h3>
<p>Building IBM Classes for Unicode requires:
<ul>
<li>Microsoft NT 3.51 or 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:
<ol>
<li>Unzip the icu-XXXX.zip file, type "unzip -a icu-XXXX.zip -d drive:\directory"
under command prompt or use WinZip. drive:\directory\icu is the root ($Root)
directory (you may but don't need to place "icu" into another directory). If you
change the root, you will change the project settings accordingly in EACH makefile in the
project, updating the include and library paths.</li>
<li>Set the environment variable <strong>ICU_DATA</strong>, the full pathname of the data
directory, to indicate where the locale data files and conversion mapping tables are.</li>
<li>Start Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0.</li>
<li>Choose "File" menu and select "Open WorkSpace".</li>
<li>In the file chooser, choose icu\source\allinone\allinone.dsw. Open this workspace.</li>
<li>This workspace includes all the IBM Classes for Unicode libraries, necessary tools as
well as intltest and cintltest test suite projects.</li>
<li>Set the active Project. Choose "Project" menu and select "Set active
project". In the submenu, select "all" workspace.</li>
<li>Set the active configuration ("Win32 Debug" or "Win32 Release") and
make sure this matches your PATH setting as described in the previous chapter. (See note
below.)</li>
<li>Choose "Build" menu and select "Rebuild All". 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".</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Save the value of the <strong>TZ</strong> environment variable and then set it to <strong>PST8PDT</strong>.
</li>
<li>Reopen the "allinone" project file and run the "intltest" test.
Reset the <strong>TZ</strong> value.</li>
<li>To run the C test suite, set "cintltst" as the active project, repeat steps 11
and then run the "cintltst" test..</li>
<li>Build and run as outlined above.</li>
</ol>
<b>
<p>Note: </b>To set the active configuration, two different possibilities are:
<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 which will always show the currently selected active
configuration. Or, you can drag the project and configuration selectiors and drop
them on the menu bar for later selection.</li>
</ul>
<p>It is also possible to build each library individually, using the workspaces in each
respective directory. They have to be built in the following order: <br>
1. common <br>
2. i18n <br>
3. makedata (which invokes makeconv, genrb,
gencol, genccode etc.)<br>
4. ctestfw <br>
5. intltest and cintltst, if you want to run
the test suite. <br>
Regarding the test suite, please read the directions in <a href="docs/intltest.html">docs/intltest.html</a>
and <a href="docs/cintltst.html">docs/cintltst.html</a> </p>
<h3>How to Install/Build on Unix</h3>
<p>There is a set of Makefiles for Unix which supports Linux w/gcc, Solaris w/gcc and
Workshop CC, AIX w/xlc and OS/390 with C++.</p>
<p>Building IBM Classes 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+). OS/390 gnu utilities for both make (gmake) and zip
(gzip/gunzip) can be found at the MKS web site at <a href="http://www.mks.com">http://www.mks.com</a>.
Please do a search on "os/390".</p>
<p>The steps are:
<ol>
<li>Unzip the icuXXXX.tar (or icuXXXX.tgz) file.</li>
<li>Before running the test programs or samples, please set the environment variable <strong>ICU_DATA</strong>,
the full pathname of the data directory, to indicate where the locale data files and
conversion mapping tables are. If this variable is not set, the default user data
directory will be used.</li>
<li>Change directory to the "icu/source".</li>
<li>If it is not already set, please set the executable flag for the following files (by
executing 'chmod +x' command): configure, install.sh and config.*, </li>
<li>You also need to set other environment variables for different build systems. Use this <a
href="docs/build_env.htm">table</a> or provided <a href="source/runConfigureICU">script</a>.</li>
<li>Type "./configure" or type "./configure --help" to print the
avialable options.</li>
<li>Type "make" to compile the libraries and all the data files. On OS/390,
both IEEE binary and native hexadecimal floating point calculations are supported.
The default is to build with native floating point support. Please set the
environment variable IEEE390=1 if you would like to make the ICU DLLs with IEEE floating
point support.</li>
<li>Optionally, type "make check" to verify the test suite.</li>
<li>Type "Make install" to install.</li>
</ol>
<p>It is also possible to build each library individually, using the Makefiles in each
respective directory. They have to be built in the following order: <br>
1. common <br>
2. i18n <br>
3. makeconv <br>
4. genrb<br>
5. gencol<br>
6. gentz<br>
7. genccode<br>
8. ctestfw <br>
9. intltest and cintltst, if you want to run
the test suite. <br>
Regarding the test suite, please read the directions in <a href="docs/intltest.html">docs/intltest.html</a>
and <a href="docs/cintltst.html">docs/cintltst.html</a> </p>
<a NAME="datahandling">
<h1>How ICU handles data</h1>
</a>
<h3><u>How to add a locale data file</u></h3>
<p>To add locale data files to IBM Classes for Unicode do the following: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>1. Create a file containing the key-value pairs which value you are overriding from the
parent locale data file. <br>
Make sure the filename is the locale ID with the extension
".txt". We recommend you copy parent file and change the values <br>
that need to be changed, remove all other key-pairs. Be sure to update
the locale ID key (the outmost brace) with <br>
the name of the locale id your a creating.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>2. Name the file with locale ID you are creating with a ".txt" at the end.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>e.g. fr_BF.txt <br>
Would create a locale that inherits all the key-value pairs from fr.txt.</p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>3. Add the name of that file (without the ".txt" extension) as a single line
in "index.txt" file in the default locale directory (icu/data/).</p>
<p>4. Regenerate the data DLL file. Please see "<a href="#HowToInstall">How to
Install</a>" section for more details on how to verify the ICU release.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a NAME="addrbdatatoapp"></a></p>
<b><u><font size="+1">
<p>How to add resource bundle data to your application</font></u></b> </p>
<p>Adding resource bundle data to your application is quite simple: </p>
<p>Create resource bundle files with the right format and names in a directory for
resource bundles you create in your application directory tree.(for more information of
that format of these files see <a href="../icuhtml/ResourceBundle.html#DOC.DOCU">resource
bundle documentation</a> or <a
href="http://www.ibm.com/java/education/international-unicode/unicodec.html">resource
bundle format)</a>. <br>
Please note that resource bundle tag names should contain only invariant 7-bit ASCII
characters (e.g. ones from the following set: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, <SP>, ", %, &,
`, (, ), *, +, ,, -, ., /, :, ;, <, =, >, ?, _).<br>
Use that same directory name (absolute path) when instantiating a resource bundle at run
time.</p>
<p><a NAME="WhereCollation"></a></p>
<h3><u>Where Collation Data is stored</u></h3>
<p>Collation data is stored in a single directory on a local disk. Each locale's data is
stored in a corresponding ASCII text file indicated by a "CollationElements" tag
. For instance, the data for de_CH is stored with a tag "CollationElements" in a
file named "de_CH.txt". Reading the collation data from these files can be
time-consuming, especially for large pieces of data that occur in languages such as
Japanese. For this reason, the Collation Framework implements a second file format, a
performance-optimized, non-portable, binary format. These binary files are generated
automatically by the framework the first time a collation table is parsed. They have names
of the form "de_CH.col". Once the files are generated by the framework, future
loading of those collations occur from the binary file, rather than the text file, at much
higher speed. </p>
<p>In general, you don't have to do anything special with these files. They can be
generated directly by using the "gencol" tool. In addition, they can also
be generated and used automatically by the framework, without intervention on your part.
However, there are situations in which you will have to regenerate them. To do so, you
must manually delete the ".col" files from your collation data directory and
re-run the gencol tool.</p>
<p>You will need to regenerate your ".col" files in the following circumstances:
<ol>
<li>You are moving your data to another platform. Since the ".col" files are
non-portable, you must make sure they are regenerated.</li>
<li><b>DO NOT </b>copy them from one platform to another.</li>
<li>You have changed the "CollationElements" data in the locale's ".txt"
file. Note that if you change the default rules for some reason, which underlie all
collations, then you will have to rebuild ALL your ".col" files, since they all
are merged with the default rule set.</li>
</ol>
<h3><a NAME="CharsetConvert"></a><u>Character Set Conversion Information</u></h3>
<p>The charset conversion library provides ways to convert simple text strings (e.g.,
char*) such as ISO 8859-1 to and from Unicode. The objective is to provide clean, simple,
reliable, portable and adaptable data structures and algorithms to support the IBM Classes
for Unicode's character codeset Conversion APIs. The conversion data in the library
originated from the NLTC lab in IBM. The IBM character set conversion tables are publicly
available in the published IBM document called "CHARACTER DATA REPRESENTATION
ARCHITECTURE - REFERENCE AND REGISTRY". The character set conversion library includes
single-byte, double-byte and some UCS encodings to and from Unicode. This document can be
ordered through Mechanicsberg and it comes with 2 CD ROMs which have machine readable
conversion tables on them. The license agreement is included in IBM Classes for Unicode
agreement. </p>
<p>Click <a href="data/convrtrs.txt">here</a> to view converters implemented in ICU. To
see converters in action, please visit <a
href="http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/localeexplorer/?converter&"><font
COLOR="#000000" size="3">http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/localeexplorer/?converter&</font></a></p>
<p>To order the document in the US you can call 1-800-879-2755 and request document number
SC09-2190-00. The cost of this publication is $75.00 US not including tax. </p>
<h3><a NAME="ProgrammingNotes"></a><u>Programming Notes</u></h3>
<h4><b><u>Reporting Errors</u></b></h4>
<p>In order for the code to be portable, only a subset of the C++ language that will
compile correctly on even the oldest of C++ compilers (and also to provide a usable C
interface) can be used in the implementation, which means that there's no use the C++
exception mechanism in the code. </p>
<p>After considering many alternatives, the decision was that every function that can fail
takes an error-code parameter by reference. This is always the last parameter in the
function’s parameter list. The ErrorCode type is defined as a enumerated type. Zero
represents no error, positive values represent errors, and negative values represent
non-error status codes. Macros were provided, SUCCESS and FAILURE, to check the error
code. </p>
<p>The ErrorCode parameter is an input-output parameter. Every function tests the error
code before doing anything else, and immediately exits if it’s a FAILURE error code.
If the function fails later on, it sets the error code appropriately and exits without
doing any other work (except, of course, any cleanup it has to do). If the function
encounters a non-error condition it wants to signal (such as "encountered an
unmappable character" in transcoding), it sets the error code appropriately and
continues. Otherwise, the function leaves the error code unchanged. </p>
<p>Generally, only functions that don’t take an ErrorCode parameter, but call
functions that do, have to declare one. Almost all functions that take an ErrorCode
parameter and also call other functions that do merely have to propagate the error code
they were passed down to the functions they call. Functions that declare a new ErrorCode
parameter must initialize it to ZERO_ERROR before calling any other functions. </p>
<p>The rationale here is to allow a function to call several functions (that take error
codes) in a row without having to check the error code after each one. [A function usually
will have to check the error code before doing any other processing, however, since it is
supposed to stop immediately after receiving an error code.] Propagating the error-code
parameter down the call chain saves the programmer from having to declare one everywhere,
and also allows us to more closely mimic the C++ exception protocol. </p>
<h4><b><u>C Function and Data Type Naming</u></b></h4>
<b>
<p>Function names.</b> If a function is identical (or almost identical) to an ANSI or
POSIX function, we give it the same name and (as much as possible) the same parameter
list. A "u" is prepended onto the beginning of the name. </p>
<p>For functions that exist prior to version 1.2.1, that the function name should begin
with a lower-case "u". After the "u" is a short code identifying the
subsystem it belongs to (e.g., "loc", "rb", "cnv",
"coll", etc.). This code is separated from the actual function name by an
underscore, and the actual function name can be anything. For example, </p>
<blockquote>
<pre><font size="-1">UChar* uloc_getLanguage(...);
void uloc_setDefaultLocale(...);
UChar* ures_getString(...);</font></pre>
</blockquote>
<p><b>Struct and enum type names.</b> For structs and enum types, the rule is that their
names begin with a capital "U." There is no underscore for struct names.</p>
<pre><font size="-1" face="Courier New"> UResourceBundle;
UCollator;
UCollationResult;</font></pre>
<b>
<p>Enum value names.</b> Enumeration values have names that begin with "UXXX"
where XXX stands for the name of the functional category.</p>
<blockquote>
<pre><font size="-1" face="Courier New">UNUM_DECIMAL;
UCOL_GREATER;</font></pre>
</blockquote>
<b>
<p>Macro names.</b> Macro names are in all caps, but there are currently no other
requirements. </p>
<p><b>Constant names.</b> Many constant names (constants defined with "const",
not macros defined with "#define" that are used as constants) begin with a
lowercase k, but this isn’t universally enforced. </p>
<h4><b><u>Preflighting and Overflow Handling</u></b></h4>
<p>In ICU's C APIs, the user needs to adhere to the following principles for consistency
across all functional categories:
<ol>
<li>All the Unicode string processing should be expressed in terms of a UChar* buffer that
is always null terminated.</li>
<li>The APIs assume that the input string parameters are statically allocated fix-sized
character buffers.</li>
<li>When the value a function is going to return is already stored as a constant value in
static space (e.g., it’s coming from a fixed table, or is stored in a cache), the
function will just return the const UChar* pointer.</li>
<li>When the function can’t return a UChar* to storage the user doesn’t have to
delete, the caller needs to pass in a pointer to a character buffer that the function can
fill with the result. This pointer needs to be accompanied by a int32_t parameter that
gives the size of the buffer.</li>
</ol>
<p>To find out how large the result buffer should be, ICU provides a <strong>preflighting</strong>
C interface. The interface works like this:
<ol>
<li>When using the "<b>preflighting</b>" option: you need to pass the function a
NULL pointer for the buffer pointer, and the function returns the actual size of the
result. You can then choose to allocate a buffer of the correct size and re-run the
operation if you would like to.</li>
<li>After allocating a buffer of some reasonable size on the stack and passes that to the
function, if the result can fit in that buffer, everything works fine. If the result
doesn’t fit, the function will return the actual size needed. You can then
allocate a buffer of the correct size on the heap and try calling the same function again.</li>
<li>Now you have created a buffer of some reasonable size on the stack and passes it to the
function. If you don't care about the completeness of the result and the allocated
buffer is too small, you can continue on using the truncated result.</li>
</ol>
<p>The following three options demonstrates how to use the preflighting interface, </p>
<blockquote>
<pre><font size="-1"><font face="Courier New">/**
</font> * @param result is a pointer to where the actual result will be.
* @param maxResultSize is the number of characters the buffer pointed to be result has room for.
* @return The actual length of the result (counting the terminating null)
*/
int32_t doSomething( /* input params */, UChar* result,
int32_t maxResultSize,<font
face="Courier New"> UErrorCode* err);</font></font></pre>
</blockquote>
<p>In this sample, if the actual result doesn’t fit in the space available in <font
size="-1" face="Courier New">maxResultSize</font>, this function returns the amount of
space necessary to hold the result, and result holds as many characters of the actual
result as possible. If you don’t care about this, no further action is necessary. If
you <i>do </i>care about the truncated characters, you can then allocate a buffer on the
heap of the size specified by the return value and call the function again, passing <i>that
</i>buffer’s address for result. </p>
<p>All preflighting functions have a fill-in <font size="-1" face="Courier New">ErrorCode</font>
parameter (and follow the normal <font size="-1" face="Courier New">ErrorCode</font>
rules), even if they are not currently doing so. Buffer overflow would be treated as a
FAILURE error condition, but would <i>not</i> be reported when the caller passes in NULL
for <font size="-1" face="Courier New">actualResultSize</font> (presumably, a NULL for
this parameter means the client doesn’t care if he got a buffer overflow). All other
failing error conditions will overwrite the "buffer overflow" error, e.g. <font
face="Courier New">MISSING_RESOURCE_ERROR</font> etc..</p>
<h4><b><u>Arrays as return types</u></b></h4>
<p>Returning an array of strings is fairly easy in C++, but very hard in C. Instead of
returning the array pointer directly, we opted for an iterative interface instead: split
the function into two functions. One returns the number of elements in the array,
and the other one returns a single specified element from the array.</p>
<blockquote>
<pre><font size="-1" face="Courier New">int32_t countArrayItems(/* params */);
int32_t getArrayElement(int32_t elementIndex, /* other params */,
UChar* result, int32_t maxResultSize, UErrorCode* err);</font></pre>
</blockquote>
<p>In this case, iterating across all the elements in the array would amount to a call to
the count() function followed by multiple calls to the getElement() function. </p>
<blockquote>
<pre><font size="-1" face="Courier New">for (i = 0; i < countArrayItems(...); i++) {
UChar element[50];
getArrayItem(i, ..., element, 50, &err);
/* do something with element */
}</font></pre>
</blockquote>
<p>In the case of the resource bundle <font face="Courier New">ures_XXXX</font> functions
returning 2-dimensional arrays, the getElement() function takes both x and y coordinates
for the desired element, and the count() function returns the number of arrays (x axis).
Since the size of each array element in the resource 2-D arrays should always be
the same, this provides an easy-to-use C interface. </p>
<blockquote>
<pre><font size="-1" face="Courier New">void countArrayItems(int32_t* rows, int32_t* columns,
/* other params */);
int32_t get2dArrayElement(int32_t rowIndex,
int32_t colIndex,
/* other params */,
UChar* result,
int32_t maxResultSize,
UErrorCode* err);</font></pre>
</blockquote>
<h3><a NAME="WhereToFindMore"></a><u>Where to Find More Information</u></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.ibm.com/java/tools/international-classes/">http://www.ibm.com/java/tools/international-classes/</a>
is a pointer to general information about the IBM Classes For Unicode. </p>
<p><a href="docs/udata.html">docs\udata.html</a> is a raw draft of ICU data handling.</p>
<p><a href="../icuhtml/aindex.html">html/aindex.html</a> is an alphabetical index to
detailed API documentation. <br>
<a href="../icuhtml/HIERjava.html">html/HIERjava.html</a> is a hierarchical index to
detailed API documentation. </p>
<p><a href="docs/collate.html">docs\collate.html</a> is an overview to Collation. </p>
<p><a href="docs/BreakIterator.html">docs\BreakIterator.html</a> is a diagram showing how
BreakIterator processes text elements. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.ibm.com/java/education/international-unicode/unicode1.html">http://www.ibm.com/java/education/international-unicode/unicode1.html</a>
is a pointer to information on how to make applications global. <br>
</p>
<h3><a NAME="SubmittingComments"></a><u>Submitting Comments, Requesting Features and
Reporting Bugs</u></h3>
<p>To submit comments, request features and report bugs, please contact us. While we
are not able to respond individually to each comment, we do review all comments. Send
Internet email to <a href="mailto:icu4c@us.ibm.com">icu4c@us.ibm.com.</a> <br>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Copyright © 1997-1999 International Business Machines Corporation an others. All
Rights Reserved.<br>
IBM Center for Java Technology Silicon Valley, <br>
10275 N De Anza Blvd., Cupertino, CA 95014 <br>
All rights reserved. </p>
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