Last updated: 2010 Apr 22nd
Copyright © 1997-2010 International Business Machines Corporation and
others. All Rights Reserved.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are two ways to download ICU releases:
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.
File | Description |
---|---|
readme.html | Describes the International Components for Unicode (this file) |
license.html | Contains the text of the ICU license |
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.
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. |
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 |
Depending on the platform and the type of installation, we recommend a small number of modifications and build options.
-DU_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE=0
or by modifying unicode/uversion.h:
Index: source/common/unicode/uversion.h =================================================================== --- source/common/unicode/uversion.h (revision 26606) +++ source/common/unicode/uversion.h (working copy) @@ -180,7 +180,8 @@ # define U_NAMESPACE_QUALIFIER U_ICU_NAMESPACE:: # ifndef U_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE -# define U_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE 1 + // Set to 0 to force namespace declarations in ICU usage. +# define U_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE 0 # endif # if U_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE U_NAMESPACE_USEICU call sites then either qualify ICU types explicitly, for example
icu::UnicodeString
,
or do using icu::UnicodeString;
where appropriate.-DU_CHARSET_IS_UTF8=1
or modify unicode/utypes.h:
Index: source/common/unicode/utypes.h =================================================================== --- source/common/unicode/utypes.h (revision 26606) +++ source/common/unicode/utypes.h (working copy) @@ -160,7 +160,7 @@ * @see UCONFIG_NO_CONVERSION */ #ifndef U_CHARSET_IS_UTF8 -# define U_CHARSET_IS_UTF8 0 +# define U_CHARSET_IS_UTF8 1 #endif /*===========================================================================*/
u_setDataDirectory()
)
or with a pointer to the data (udata_setCommonData()
)
before other ICU API calls.
This is usually easy if ICU is used from an application where
main()
takes care of such initialization.
It may be hard if ICU is shipped with
another shared library (such as the Xerces-C++ XML parser)
which does not control main()
.--with-data-packaging=archive
on the configure command line, as inrunConfigureICU Linux --with-data-packaging=archive
runConfigureICU Linux --enable-static --disable-shared
~/icu$ svn export http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/icu/trunk ~/icu$ mkdir trunk-dev ~/icu$ cd trunk-dev ~/icu/trunk-dev$ ../trunk/source/runConfigureICU Linux ~/icu/trunk-dev$ make check
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.
-DICU_DATA_DIR=/path/to/icu/data
when building
the ICU code. (Used by source/common/putil.c.)-DICU_NO_USER_DATA_OVERRIDE
if you do not want the "ICU_DATA" environment variable to be used.
(An application can still override the data path via
u_setDataDirectory()
or
udata_setCommonData()
.@draft
is new and not yet stable. Applications must not rely on unstable
APIs from a system-level library.
Define U_HIDE_DRAFT_API
, U_HIDE_INTERNAL_API
and U_HIDE_SYSTEM_API
by modifying unicode/utypes.h before installing it.\brief C++ API
.
Consider not installing these header files.runConfigureICU Linux --disable-renaming
Building International Components for Unicode requires:
The steps are:
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.
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:
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.
Building International Components for Unicode on UNIX requires:
Here are the steps to build ICU:
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).
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:
OS390_XPLINK=1
prior to
invoking the make process to produce binaries that are enabled for
XPLINK. The XPLINK option, which is available for z/OS 1.2 and later,
requires the PTF PQ69418 to build XPLINK enabled binaries.--with-iostream=old
configure option
when using runConfigureICU. This will prevent applications that use the
icuio library from crashing.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
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.
CRTLIB LIB(libraryname) ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(OUTPUTDIR) VALUE('libraryname') REPLACE(*YES)
ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(MAKE) VALUE('/usr/bin/gmake') REPLACE(*YES) CHGJOB CCSID(37)
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