The Internationalization Module is built on the International Components for Unicode (ICU). ICU is an open source library written in C and C++, and developed and maintained by IBM. It is the industry standard for Unicode processing.

Unicode is a universal character encoding scheme for written characters and text. It is the industry standard for writing internationalized applications that support multilingual text. Using Unicode in your applications, you can encode virtually all the characters used for all of the written languages of the world.

The Internationalization Module has the following features:

• an intuitive, Rogue Wave style API

• seamless interoperability with other Rogue Wave C++ products

• support for Unicode string processing, using the UTF-16 encoding form for the internal representation and manipulation of text

• easy conversion between UTF-16 and hundreds of other character encodings

• support for Unicode regular expression pattern matching

• support for locale-sensitive Unicode string searches

• support for locale-sensitive collation of Unicode strings

• support for locale-sensitive boundary analysis of Unicode strings

• support for tokenizing Unicode strings

• support for storing and accessing locale-dependent data

• support for Unicode string normalization

• a convenient, C++ style, exception-based mechanism for responding to error conditions