ICU 70

ICU is the premier library for software internationalization, used by a wide array of companies and organizations.

Release Overview

ICU 70 updates to Unicode 14, including new characters, scripts, emoji, and corresponding API constants. ICU 70 adds support for emoji properties of strings. It also updates to CLDR 40 locale data with many additions and corrections. ICU 70 also includes many other bug fixes and enhancements, especially for measurement unit formatting.

For more details, including migration issues, see below.

Please use the icu-support mailing list and/or find/submit error reports.

🔴🔴🔴 Do you need ICU to work on EBCDIC platforms? 🔴🔴🔴

• • We need help: Someone needs to build ICU4C on a native-EBCDIC machine (z or i), fix C++ compiler issues (if any), fix issues related to an EBCDIC codepage as the system encoding, and test frequently (or add their machine into our CI). Please contact us via the icu-support mailing list.

  • Otherwise we will remove the support code for non-ASCII-family platforms. Details: ICU-21672

Version Number

The initial release has library version number 70.1.

1. • Release date: 2021-10-27

   • List of tickets fixed in ICU 70

If there are maintenance releases, they will be 70.2, 70.3, etc. (During ICU 70 development, the library version number was 70.0.x.)

Note: There may be additional commits on the maint-70 branch that are not included in the prepackaged download files.

Common Changes

• • Unicode 14:

    • 5 new scripts, 37 new emoji (plus additional new sequences), the som currency sign used in the Kyrgyz Republic, 838 total new characters

    • Line breaking updated for emoji forward compatibility for emoji. Unicode 14 and ICU 70 already handle line breaking for emoji that will be added in Unicode 15/16.

  • CLDR 40 (blog):

    • Grammatical features (gender and case) for units of measurement in 29 additional locales

    • Many improvements and bug fixes; see the CLDR release page

  • New support for emoji properties of strings; for example, Basic_Emoji and RGI_Emoji (ICU-21652)

    • This includes a new version of hasBinaryProperty() that takes a string argument.

    • Complementing a set via pattern syntax (^ or \P) or applyPattern() and similar performs a “code point complement” (which removes multi-character strings) (ICU-21524)

• Time zone data (tzdata) version 2021e (2021-oct) except that for now we retain pre-1970 time zone data that has recently been removed from the TZ DB. (Reports as version "2021a3")

ICU4C Specific Changes

• • ICU operator==() and operator!=() functions now return bool instead of UBool, as an adjustment for incompatible changes in C++20 (ICU-20973)

    • ICU 70 can now be built and used with C++20 compilers.

  • Memory management continues to be reviewed and made simpler & safer by using more smart pointers.

  • String Search is slightly faster and uses less memory (ICU-21533, ICU-21710).

  • API changes since ICU4C 69 (Markdown) / (HTML)

ICU4J Specific Changes

• • ICU 70 still only requires Java 7 but has also been tested with Java 8..16 (ICU-21621 & ICU-21626 for Java 16)

  • Several character-related APIs have been widened from char to int arguments, for convenience and for more reliable call sites (ICU-21655)

  • API Changes since ICU4J 69

Migration Issues

• 1. For the LocaleMatcher: English in Canada (en-CA) and English in the Philippines (en-PH) now match American English (en=en-US) more closely than British English (en-GB). This will be visible in product behavior.

  2. ICU4C: String search now lazy creates the internal break iterator. This can cause warnings that would have been reported by usearch_open to shift to other APIs like usearch_next, depending on when the break iterator gets created. Callers checking for exact statuses like U_ZERO_ERROR should consider using the U_SUCCESS() macro instead (ICU-21533, ICU-21710).

  3. See also CLDR 40 migration issues.

ICU4C Platform Support

ICU4C requires C++11 and has been tested with up to C++20.

We routinely test on recent versions of Linux, macOS, and Windows.

We accept patches for other platforms.

Windows: The minimum supported version is Windows 7. (See How To Build And Install On Windows for more details.)

ICU4J Platform Support

ICU4J works on Java 7..16 and on Android API level 21 and later.

Download

Source and binary downloads are available on the git/GitHub tag page: https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/releases/tag/release-70-1

See the Source Code Access page for how to download the ICU file tree directly from GitHub.

ICU locale data was generated from CLDR tag https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/releases/tag/release-40.

Maven dependency:

<dependency>

<groupId>com.ibm.icu</groupId>

<artifactId>icu4j</artifactId>

<version>70.1</version>

</dependency>