The International Component for Unicode (ICU) is a mature, portable set of C/C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization (I18N) and globalization (G11N), giving applications the same results on all platforms.

ICU provides robust, full-featured Unicode services on a wide variety of platforms, without sacrificing performance. An open source project sponsored, supported, and used by IBM, ICU is providing robust, full-featured, commercial quality Unicode-based technologies. Supporting the most current version of the Unicode standard, including supplementary Unicode characters needed for support of the repertoires of GB 18030, HKSCS, and JIS X 0213, it offers great flexibility to extend and customize supplied services, including:

Text: Unicode text handling, full character properties and character set conversions (500+ code pages)
Analysis: Unicode regular expressions; full Unicode sets; character, word and line boundaries
Comparison: language sensitive collation and searching
Transformations: normalization, upper/lowercase, script transliterations (50+ pairs)
Locales: comprehensive data (230+) & resource bundle architecture
Complex Text Layout: Arabic, Hebrew, Indic and Thai
Formatting and Parsing: multi-calendar and time zone,dates, times, numbers, currencies, messages