ICU 3.6 Archive

NOTE: This is an archive of a very old ICU release.

Use these links to find the source mentioned below:

Download ICU 3.6 release

Description

ICU is the premier library for software internationalization. ICU 3.6 is a major release of ICU, with new features, new APIs, and many bug fixes in data and code.

Major changes in ICU 3.6 include the following:

    • Unicode: ICU uses and supports Unicode 5.0, which is the latest major release of Unicode. Unicode 5.0 will be used in many operating systems and applications, and this version of ICU is important maintain interoperability with these new operating systems and applications. More information about Unicode 5.0 can be found in the Unicode press release.

    • Locale Data: ICU uses and supports data from Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) 1.4, which includes many improvements in quality and quantity of data. There is 25% more CLDR locale data in 245 locales in ICU.

  • ICU4C Specific Changes

      • Charset Detection: A charset detection framework was added, which provides heuristics for detecting the charset for unlabeled sequences of bytes.

      • Layout: The font layout engine has support added for Tibetan, Sinhala and Old Hangul.

      • BiDi: The BiDi algorithm was enhanced to be more flexible and efficient

      • ICU Data Management: The new icupkg tool provides an easier way to manage ICU's data library. This tool allows you to add, update or remove data from ICU's data archive.

      • Time Zones The time zone data is modularized to allow easier building and updating of the data.

      • Word Boundaries: The Thai word break iteration was improved to be more accurate. Also dictionary based detection of Thai word boundaries is now active for all locales.

    • UText

        • The BreakIterator uses UText for abstract text processing.

        • 64-bit indexing is now used to allow access to larger chunks of text.

        • API for read-only locking for security and robustness was added.

    • Performance

        • The u_sprintf/u_sscanf performance from the icuio library has been improved for number formatting/parsing.

        • Constructing a DateFormat is significantly faster for many locales.

        • Opening and closing a charset converter is significantly faster.

        • The UTF-8 transformation functions and macros are faster.

        • The UText API was improved for performance.

        • The collation open and close functions have a small performance improvement.

  • ICU4J Specific Changes

      • Globalization Preferences: A new flexible container for locale data was added.

      • Formatting: A preview of flexible date/time format generator has been added. This allows multiple date and time format patterns to be generated that are valid for specific locales.

      • Charset Conversion: A preview of the ICU4J implementation of the java.nio.charset.Charset API was added.

Note: Do not use preview APIs in production code. They may change drastically in subsequent releases.

ICU4C Download

Release Date

2006-Sep-01

Source Code Download

In addition to these .tar and .zip files, the code is also tagged in SubVersion with release-3-6.

Binary Distribution Download

Here are the binary distributions of the ICU libraries on our reference platforms.

Platform Installation Notes

Please be sure to view the readme.html that is included in ICU. Most installation questions can be answered there. The z/OS (OS/390) unpax-icu.sh script is required to unpackage the compressed tar file on z/OS, and the i5/OS (OS/400) unpax-icu.sh script is required to unpackage the compressed file on i5/OS.

The ICU4C 3.6 source downloads contains a pre-built .dat data archive with ICU's data rather than the data source files. This is to simplify the build process for the majority of users and to reduce platform porting issues. If you need the data source files for customization, then please download the ICU source code from SubVersion repository. If you need to remove data from ICU's data library, you can also consider using the new icupkg tool to modify the data built into ICU.

Known Issues, Bugs and Patches

For the list of known issues with ICU4C 3.6 please see the readme file.

ICU4J Download

Release Date

2007-Apr-30

Downloads

In addition to these .jar, the code is also tagged in SubVersion with release-3-6-1.

Platform Installation Notes

Please be sure to view the readme.html that is included in ICU4J. Most installation questions can be answered there.

ICU4JNI Download

Release Date

2006-Oct-01

Downloads

In addition to this .zip, the code is also tagged in SubVersion with release-3-6.

Platform Installation Notes

Please be sure to view the readme.html that is included in ICU4JNI. Most installation questions can be answered there.