International Components for Unicode
ICU 4.4.1 ReadMe

Last updated: 2010 Apr 22nd
Copyright © 1997-2010 International Business Machines Corporation and others. All Rights Reserved.


Table of Contents


Introduction

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 (ICU) libraries provide robust and full-featured Unicode services on a wide variety of platforms to help this design goal. The ICU libraries provide support for:

ICU has a sister project ICU4J 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.

Getting started

This document describes how to build and install ICU on your machine. For other information about ICU please see the following table of links.
The ICU homepage also links to related information about writing internationalized software.

Here are some useful links regarding ICU and internationalization in general.
ICU, ICU4C & ICU4J Homepage http://icu-project.org/
FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions about ICU http://userguide.icu-project.org/icufaq
ICU User's Guide http://userguide.icu-project.org/
Download ICU Releases http://site.icu-project.org/download
ICU4C API Documentation Online http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/
Online ICU Demos http://demo.icu-project.org/icu-bin/icudemos
Contacts and Bug Reports/Feature Requests http://site.icu-project.org/contacts

Important: Please make sure you understand the Copyright and License Information.

What is new in this release?

To see which APIs are new or changed in this release, view the ICU4C API Change Report.

For more news about this release, see the ICU download page.

How To Download the Source Code

There are two ways to download ICU releases:

ICU Source Code Organization

In the descriptions below, <ICU> is the full path name of the ICU directory (the top level directory from the distribution archives) in your file system. You can also view the ICU Architectural Design section of the User's Guide to see which libraries you need for your software product. You need at least the data ([lib]icudt) and the common ([lib]icuuc) libraries in order to use ICU.

The following files describe the code drop.
File Description
readme.html Describes the International Components for Unicode (this file)
license.html Contains the text of the ICU license


The following directories contain source code and data files.
Directory Description
<ICU>/source/common/ The core Unicode and support functionality, such as resource bundles, character properties, locales, codepage conversion, normalization, Unicode properties, Locale, and UnicodeString.
<ICU>/source/i18n/ 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.
<ICU>/source/layout/ Contains the ICU layout engine (not a rasterizer).
<ICU>/source/io/ Contains the ICU I/O library.
<ICU>/source/data/

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.

If some of the following directories are missing, it's probably because you got an official download. If you need the data source files for customization, then please download the ICU source code from subversion.

  • in/ A directory that contains a pre-built data library for ICU. A standard source code package will contain this file without several of the following directories. This is to simplify the build process for the majority of users and to reduce platform porting issues.
  • brkitr/ Data files for character, word, sentence, title casing and line boundary analysis.
  • locales/ These .txt files contain ICU language and culture-specific localization data. Two special bundles are root, which is the fallback data and parent of other bundles, and index, which contains a list of installed bundles. The makefile resfiles.mk contains the list of resource bundle files.
  • mappings/ Here are the code page converter tables. These .ucm files contain mappings to and from Unicode. These are compiled into .cnv files. convrtrs.txt is the alias mapping table from various converter name formats to ICU internal format and vice versa. It produces cnvalias.icu. The makefiles ucmfiles.mk, ucmcore.mk, and ucmebcdic.mk contain the list of converters to be built.
  • translit/ This directory contains transliterator rules as resource bundles, a makefile trnsfiles.mk containing the list of installed system translitaration files, and as well the special bundle translit_index which lists the system transliterator aliases.
  • unidata/ This directory contains the Unicode data files. Please see http://www.unicode.org/ for more information.
  • misc/ The misc directory contains other data files which did not fit into the above categories. Currently it only contains time zone information, and a name preperation file for IDNA.
  • out/ This directory contains the assembled memory mapped files.
  • out/build/ This directory contains intermediate (compiled) files, such as .cnv, .res, etc.

If you are creating a special ICU build, you can set the ICU_DATA environment variable to the out/ or the out/build/ directories, but this is generally discouraged because most people set it incorrectly. You can view the ICU Data Management section of the ICU User's Guide for details.

<ICU>/source/test/intltest/ A test suite including all C++ APIs. For information about running the test suite, see the build instructions specific to your platform later in this document.
<ICU>/source/test/cintltst/ A test suite written in C, including all C APIs. For information about running the test suite, see the build instructions specific to your platform later in this document.
<ICU>/source/test/iotest/ A test suite written in C and C++ to test the icuio library. For information about running the test suite, see the build instructions specific to your platform later in this document.
<ICU>/source/test/testdata/ Source text files for data, which are read by the tests. It contains the subdirectories out/build/ which is used for intermediate files, and out/ which contains testdata.dat.
<ICU>/source/tools/ Tools for generating the data files. Data files are generated by invoking <ICU>/source/data/build/makedata.bat on Win32 or <ICU>/source/make on UNIX.
<ICU>/source/samples/ Various sample programs that use ICU
<ICU>/source/extra/ Non-supported API additions. Currently, it contains the 'uconv' tool to perform codepage conversion on files.
<ICU>/packaging/ This directory contain scripts and tools for packaging the final ICU build for various release platforms.
<ICU>/source/config/ Contains helper makefiles for platform specific build commands. Used by 'configure'.
<ICU>/source/allinone/ Contains top-level ICU workspace and project files, for instance to build all of ICU under one MSVC project.
<ICU>/include/ Contains the headers needed for developing software that uses ICU on Windows.
<ICU>/lib/ Contains the import libraries for linking ICU into your Windows application.
<ICU>/bin/ Contains the libraries and executables for using ICU on Windows.

How To Build And Install ICU

Supported Platforms

Here is the status of building ICU on several different platforms.
AIX 6.1 (power, 64-bit) VisualAge 9 Frequently Tested
HP/UX 11iv3 (ia64, 64-bit) aCC A.06.15 Frequently Tested
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86, 32-bit) gcc 4.1.2 Frequently Tested
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86, 64-bit) gcc 4.1.2 Frequently Tested
Solaris 10 (sparc, 64-bit) Sun Studio 12 Frequently Tested
Windows Vista SP1 (x86, 32-bit) MS Visual Studio 9 Frequently Tested
AIX 5.2 (power, 64-bit) VisualAge 6 Frequently Tested
AIX 5.3 (power, 64-bit) VisualAge 8 Frequently Tested
AIX 6.1 (power, 64-bit) gcc 4.2.4 Frequently Tested
HP/UX 11i (hppa, 64-bit) aCC A.03.85 Frequently Tested
MacOSX 10.5 Leopard (x86, 32-bit) gcc 4.0.1 Frequently Tested
MacOSX 10.5 Leopard (x86, 64-bit) gcc 4.0.1 Frequently Tested
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.2 (x86, 32-bit) gcc 3.4.6 Frequently Tested
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4u7 (x86, 32-bit) gcc 4.2.4 Frequently Tested
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86, 32-bit) icc 11.0 Frequently Tested
[See Change]
Solaris 10 (sparc, 64-bit) gcc 4.2.1 Frequently Tested
SuSE 10 (x86, 64-bit) gcc 4.1.0 Frequently Tested
Windows 2000 Professional (x86, 32-bit) MS Visual Studio 2003 via Cygwin Frequently Tested
Windows 2000 Professional (x86, 32-bit) gcc 3.4.4 via Cygwin Frequently Tested
Windows Server 2003 (x86, 64-bit) MS Visual Studio 8 via Cygwin Frequently Tested
Windows Server 2008 (x86, 64-bit) MS Visual Studio 9 Frequently Tested
Windows XP Professional (x86, 32-bit) MS Visual Studio 9 Frequently Tested
Windows Server 2008 (x86, 64-bit) MS Visual Studio 9 via Cygwin Frequently Tested
SuSe Linux 7.2 (x86, 32-bit) icc 9.0 Broken #6888
z/OS 1.7 cxx 1.7 Rarely tested
IBM i family (IBM i, i5/OS, OS/400) iCC Rarely tested
MinGW gcc Rarely tested
NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD gcc Rarely tested
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (PowerPC) IBM XL C/C++ 8.0 Rarely tested
QNX gcc Rarely tested
BeOS/Haiku gcc Rarely tested
SGI/IRIX MIPSpro CC Rarely tested
Tru64 (OSF) Compaq's cxx compiler Rarely tested
MP-RAS NCR MP-RAS C/C++ Compiler Rarely tested


Key to testing frequency

Frequently tested
ICU will work on these platforms with these compilers
Rarely tested
ICU has been ported to these platforms but may not have been tested there recently

Recommended Build Options

Depending on the platform and the type of installation, we recommend a small number of modifications and build options.

ICU as a System-Level Library

If ICU is installed as a system-level library, there are further opportunities and restrictions to consider. For details, see the Using ICU as an Operating System Level Library section of the User Guide ICU Architectural Design chapter.

How To Build And Install On Windows

Building International Components for Unicode requires:

The steps are:

  1. 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.
  2. Be sure that the ICU binary directory, <ICU>\bin\, is included in the PATH environment variable. The tests will not work without the location of the ICU DLL files in the path.
  3. Open the "<ICU>\source\allinone\allinone.sln" workspace file in Microsoft Visual Studio 2003. (This solution includes all the International Components for Unicode libraries, necessary ICU building tools, and the test suite projects). Please see the command line note below if you want to build from the command line instead.
  4. Set the active platform to "Win32" or "x64" (See Windows platform note below) and configuration to "Debug" or "Release" (See Windows configuration note below).
  5. Choose the "Build" menu and select "Rebuild Solution". If you want to build the Debug and Release at the same time, see the batch configuration note below.
  6. Run the C++ test suite, "intltest". To do this: set the active startup project to "intltest", and press Ctrl+F5 to run it. Make sure that it passes without any errors.
  7. Run the C test suite, "cintltst". To do this: set the active startup project to "cintltst", and press Ctrl+F5 to run it. Make sure that it passes without any errors.
  8. Run the I/O test suite, "iotest". To do this: set the active startup project to "iotest", and press Ctrl+F5 to run it. Make sure that it passes without any errors.
  9. You are now able to develop applications with ICU by using the libraries and tools in <ICU>\bin\. The headers are in <ICU>\include\ and the link libraries are in <ICU>\lib\. To install the ICU runtime on a machine, or ship it with your application, copy the needed components from <ICU>\bin\ to a location on the system PATH or to your application directory.

Using MSDEV At The Command Line Note: 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, 'devenv.com <ICU>\source\allinone\allinone.sln /build "Win32|Release"'. You can also use Cygwin with this compiler to build ICU, and you can refer to the How To Build And Install On Windows with Cygwin section for more details.

Setting Active Platform Note: Even though you are able to select "x64" as the active platform, if your operating system is not a 64 bit version of Windows, the build will fail. To set the active platform, two different possibilities are:

Setting Active Configuration Note: To set the active configuration, two different possibilities are:

Batch Configuration Note: If you want to build the Win32 and x64 platforms and Debug and Release configurations at the same time, choose "Build" menu, and select "Batch Build...". Click the "Select All" button, and then click the "Rebuild" button.

How To Build And Install On Windows with Cygwin

Building International Components for Unicode with this configuration requires:

There are two ways you can build ICU with Cygwin. You can build with gcc or Microsoft Visual C++. If you use gcc, the resulting libraries and tools will depend on the Cygwin environment. If you use Microsoft Visual C++, the resulting libraries and tools do not depend on Cygwin and can be more easily distributed to other Windows computers (the generated man pages and shell scripts still need Cygwin). To build with gcc, please follow the "How To Build And Install On UNIX" instructions, while you are inside a Cygwin bash shell. To build with Microsoft Visual C++, please use the following instructions:

  1. Start the Windows "Command Prompt" window. This is different from the gcc build, which requires the Cygwin Bash command prompt. The Microsoft Visual C++ compiler will not work with a bash command prompt.
  2. If the computer isn't set up to use Visual C++ from the command line, you need to run vcvars32.bat.
    For example:
    "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat" can be used for 32-bit builds or
    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\amd64\vcvarsamd64.bat" can be used for 64-bit builds on Windows x64.
  3. 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.
  4. Change directory to "icu/source", which is where you unzipped ICU.
  5. Run "bash ./runConfigureICU Cygwin/MSVC" (See Windows configuration note and non-functional configure options below).
  6. Type "make" to compile the libraries and all the data files. This make command should be GNU make.
  7. Optionally, type "make check" to run the test suite, which checks for ICU's functionality integrity (See testing note below).
  8. Type "make install" to install ICU. If you used the --prefix= option on configure or runConfigureICU, ICU will be installed to the directory you specified. (See installation note below).

Configuring ICU on Windows NOTE:

Ensure that the order of the PATH is MSVC, Cygwin, and then other PATHs. The configure script needs certain tools in Cygwin (e.g. grep).

Also, you may need to run "dos2unix.exe" on all of the scripts (e.g. configure) in the top source directory of ICU. To avoid this issue, you can download the ICU source for Unix platforms (icu-xxx.tgz).

In addition to the Unix configuration note the following configure options currently do not work on Windows with Microsoft's compiler. Some options can work by manually editing icu/source/common/unicode/pwin32.h, but manually editing the files is not recommended.

How To Build And Install On UNIX

Building International Components for Unicode on UNIX requires:

Here are the steps to build ICU:

  1. Decompress the icu-X.Y.tgz (or icu-X.Y.tar.gz) file. For example, "gunzip -d < icu-X.Y.tgz | tar xvf -"
  2. Change directory to the "icu/source".
  3. Run "chmod +x runConfigureICU configure install-sh" because these files may have the wrong permissions.
  4. Run the runConfigureICU script for your platform. (See configuration note below).
  5. Type "gmake" (or "make" if GNU make is the default make on your platform) to compile the libraries and all the data files. The proper name of the GNU make command is printed at the end of the configuration run, as in "You must use gmake to compile ICU".
  6. Optionally, type "gmake check" to run the test suite, which checks for ICU's functionality integrity (See testing note below).
  7. Type "gmake install" to install ICU. If you used the --prefix= option on configure or runConfigureICU, ICU will be installed to the directory you specified. (See installation note below).

Configuring ICU NOTE: Type "./runConfigureICU --help" for help on how to run it and a list of supported platforms. You may also want to type "./configure --help" to print the available configure options that you may want to give runConfigureICU. If you are not using the runConfigureICU script, or your platform is not supported by the script, you may need to set your CC, CXX, CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS environment variables, and type "./configure". HP-UX users, please see this note regarding HP-UX multithreaded build issues with newer compilers. Solaris users, please see this note regarding Solaris multithreaded build issues.

ICU is built with strict compiler warnings enabled by default. If this causes excessive numbers of warnings on your platform, use the --disable-strict option to configure to reduce the warning level.

Running The Tests From The Command Line NOTE: You may have to set certain variables if you with to run test programs individually, that is apart from "gmake check". The environment variable ICU_DATA can be set to the full pathname of the data directory to indicate where the locale data files and conversion mapping tables are when you are not using the shared library (e.g. by using the .dat archive or the individual data files). The trailing "/" is required after the directory name (e.g. "$Root/source/data/out/" will work, but the value "$Root/source/data/out" is not acceptable). You do not need to set ICU_DATA if the complete shared data library is in your library path.

Installing ICU NOTE: 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 Subversion, 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).

How To Build And Install On z/OS (OS/390)

You can install ICU on z/OS or OS/390 (the previous name of z/OS), but IBM tests only the z/OS installation. You install ICU in a z/OS UNIX system services file system such as HFS or zFS. On this platform, it is important that you understand a few details:

z/OS (Batch/PDS) support outside the UNIX system services environment

By default, ICU builds its libraries into the UNIX file system (HFS). In addition, there is a z/OS specific environment variable (OS390BATCH) to build some libraries into the z/OS native file system. This is useful, for example, when your application is externalized via Job Control Language (JCL).

The OS390BATCH environment variable enables non-UNIX support including the batch environment. When OS390BATCH is set, the libicui18nXX.dll, libicuucXX.dll, and libicudtXXe.dll binaries are built into data sets (the native file system). Turning on OS390BATCH does not turn off the normal z/OS UNIX build. This means that the z/OS UNIX (HFS) DLLs will always be created.

Two additional environment variables indicate the names of the z/OS data sets to use. The LOADMOD environment variable identifies the name of the data set that contains the dynamic link libraries (DLLs) and the LOADEXP environment variable identifies the name of the data set that contains the side decks, which are normally the files with the .x suffix in the UNIX file system.

A data set is roughly equivalent to a UNIX or Windows file. For most kinds of data sets the operating system maintains record boundaries. UNIX and Windows files are byte streams. Two kinds of data sets are PDS and PDSE. Each data set of these two types contains a directory. It is like a UNIX directory. Each "file" is called a "member". Each member name is limited to eight bytes, normally EBCDIC.

Here is an example of some environment variables that you can set prior to building ICU:

OS390BATCH=1
LOADMOD=USER.ICU.LOAD
LOADEXP=USER.ICU.EXP

The PDS member names for the DLL file names are as follows:

IXMIXXIN --> libicui18nXX.dll
IXMIXXUC --> libicuucXX.dll
IXMIXXDA --> libicudtXXe.dll

You should point the LOADMOD environment variable at a partitioned data set extended (PDSE) and point the LOADEXP environment variable at a partitioned data set (PDS). The PDSE can be allocated with the following attributes:

Data Set Name . . . : USER.ICU.LOAD
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: 1
Secondary cylinders : 5
Data set name type  : LIBRARY

The PDS can be allocated with the following attributes:

Data Set Name . . . : USER.ICU.EXP
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

How To Build And Install On The IBM i Family (IBM i, i5/OS OS/400)

Before you start building ICU, ICU requires the following:

The following describes how to setup and build ICU. For background information, you should look at the UNIX build instructions.

  1. Create 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.
    CRTLIB LIB(libraryname)
    ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(OUTPUTDIR) VALUE('libraryname') REPLACE(*YES)   
    
  2. Set up the following environment variables and job characteristics in your build process
    ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(MAKE) VALUE('/usr/bin/gmake') REPLACE(*YES)
    CHGJOB CCSID(37)
    
  3. Run 'QSH'
  4. Run gunzip on the ICU source code compressed tar archive (icu-X.Y.tgz).
  5. Run unpax-icu.sh on the tar file generated from the previous step.
  6. Change your current directory to icu/source.
  7. Run './runConfigureICU IBMi' (See configuration note for details).
  8. Run 'gmake' to build ICU.
  9. Run 'gmake check QIBM_MULTI_THREADED=Y' to build and run the tests. You can look at the iSeries Information Center for more details regarding the running of multiple threads on IBM i.

How To Cross Compile ICU

This section will explain how to build ICU on one platform, but to produce binaries intended to run on another. This is commonly known as a cross compile.

Normally, in the course of a build, ICU needs to run the tools that it builds in order to generate and package data and test-data.In a cross compilation setting, ICU is built on a different system from that which it eventually runs on. An example might be, if you are building for a small/he