English
ReadMe for ICU 49.1.1
International Components for Unicode
ICU 49.1.1 ReadMe
Last updated: 2012-Apr-04
Copyright © 1997-2012 International Business Machines Corporation and
others. All Rights Reserved.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Getting Started
- What Is New In This release?
- How To Download the Source Code
- ICU Source Code Organization
- How To Build And Install ICU
- How To Package ICU
- Important Notes About Using ICU
- Platform Dependencies
Introduction
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:
- The latest version of the Unicode standard
- Character set conversions with support for over 220 codepages
- Locale data for more than 260 locales
- Language sensitive text collation (sorting) and searching based on the Unicode Collation Algorithm (=ISO 14651)
- Regular expression matching and Unicode sets
- Transformations for normalization, upper/lowercase, script transliterations (50+ pairs)
- Resource bundles for storing and accessing localized information
- Date/Number/Message formatting and parsing of culture specific input/output formats
- Calendar specific date and time manipulation
- Complex text layout for Arabic, Hebrew, Indic and Thai
- Text boundary analysis for finding characters, word and sentence boundaries
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.
Getting started
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/ |
| How To Use ICU | http://userguide.icu-project.org/howtouseicu |
| 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.
What is new in this release?
To see which APIs are new or changed in this release, view the ICU4C API Change Report.
The following list concentrates on changes that affect existing applications migrating from previous ICU releases. For more news about this release, see the ICU download page.
C++ namespace support required
ICU4C 49 requires C++ namespace support.
As a result, for example, rather than U_NAMESPACE_QUALIFIER UnicodeString
you can now simply write icu::UnicodeString.
One shared platform.h
ICU4C 49 does not generate any source code files via autoconf any more.
Instead, platform.h itself is now a normal source header file,
and determines platform-specific settings via #if ... etc.
(See the User Guide How To Use ICU chapter.)
As a result, it is easier to cross-compile ICU4C and/or use different build systems.
No more headers are #included from the build-output directory,
and all platforms use the same set of source code files.
However, it is likely that ICU4C 49 will not compile on some platforms
(non-POSIX and/or older/unusual compilers etc.) that the ICU team did not test.
As a temporary workaround, any platform-dependent macro for which platform.h
does not determine the correct value can be predefined via CPPFLAGS
or by adding an explicit #define ... into platform.h
before it first tests that macro.
Please submit a bug ticket per platform with details about your compiler,
its version and its predefined macros.
(For example, preprocessing an empty source file with gcc's -dM option
outputs all of gcc's predefined macros: gcc -E -dM -x c /dev/null | sort)
A patch to fix the problem would be welcome too!
How To Download the Source Code
There are two ways to download ICU releases:
- Official Release Snapshot:
If you want to use ICU (as opposed to developing it), you should download an official packaged version of the ICU source code. These versions are tested more thoroughly than day-to-day development builds of the system, and they are packaged in zip and tar files for convenient download. These packaged files can be found at http://site.icu-project.org/download.
The packaged snapshots are named icu-nnnn.zip or icu-nnnn.tgz, where nnnn is the version number. The .zip file is used for Windows platforms, while the .tgz file is preferred on most other platforms.
Please unzip this file. - Subversion Source Repository:
If you are interested in developing features, patches, or bug fixes for ICU, you should probably be working with the latest version of the ICU source code. You will need to check the code out of our Subversion repository to ensure that you have the most recent version of all of the files. See our source repository for details.
ICU Source Code Organization
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. |
How To Build And Install ICU
Recommended Build Options
Depending on the platform and the type of installation, we recommend a small number of modifications and build options.
- Namespace: By default, unicode/uversion.h has
"using namespace icu;" which defeats much of the purpose of the namespace.
(This is for historical reasons: Originally, ICU4C did not use namespaces,
and some compilers did not support them. The default "using" statement
preserves source code compatibility.)
We recommend you turn this off via-DU_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE=0or 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 exampleicu::UnicodeString, or dousing icu::UnicodeString;where appropriate. - Hardcode the default charset to UTF-8: On platforms where
the default charset is always UTF-8,
like MacOS X and some Linux distributions,
we recommend hardcoding ICU's default charset to UTF-8.
This means that some implementation code becomes simpler and faster,
and statically linked ICU libraries become smaller.
(See the U_CHARSET_IS_UTF8
API documentation for more details.)
You can-DU_CHARSET_IS_UTF8=1or modify unicode/utypes.h (in ICU 4.8 and below) or modify unicode/platform.h (in ICU 49 and higher):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 /*===========================================================================*/
- UnicodeString constructors: The UnicodeString class has
several single-argument constructors that are not marked "explicit"
for historical reasons.
This can lead to inadvertent construction of a
UnicodeStringwith a single character by using an integer, and it can lead to inadvertent dependency on the conversion framework by using a C string literal.
Beginning with ICU 49, you should do the following:- Consider marking the from-
UCharand from-UChar32constructors explicit via-DUNISTR_FROM_CHAR_EXPLICIT=explicitor similar. - Consider marking the from-
const char*and from-const UChar*constructors explicit via-DUNISTR_FROM_STRING_EXPLICIT=explicitor similar.
- Consider marking the from-
- utf.h, utf8.h, utf16.h, utf_old.h:
By default, utypes.h (and thus almost every public ICU header)
includes all of these header files.
Often, none of them are needed, or only one or two of them.
All of utf_old.h is deprecated or obsolete.
Beginning with ICU 49, you should defineU_NO_DEFAULT_INCLUDE_UTF_HEADERSto 1 (via -D or uconfig.h, as above) and include those header files explicitly that you actually need.
Note: The ICU test suites cannot be compiled with this setting. - .dat file: By default, the ICU data is built into
a shared library (DLL). This is convenient because it requires no
install-time or runtime configuration,
but the library is platform-specific and cannot be modified.
A .dat package file makes the opposite trade-off:
Platform-portable (except for endianness and charset family, which
can be changed with the icupkg tool)
and modifiable (also with the icupkg tool).
If a path is set, then single data files (e.g., .res files)
can be copied to that location to provide new locale data
or conversion tables etc.
The only drawback with a .dat package file is that the application needs to provide ICU with the file system path to the package file (e.g., by callingu_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 wheremain()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 controlmain().
See the User Guide ICU Data chapter for more details.
If possible, we recommend building the .dat package. Specify--with-data-packaging=archiveon the configure command line, as in
runConfigureICU Linux --with-data-packaging=archive
(Read the configure script's output for further instructions. On Windows, the Visual Studio build generates both the .dat package and the data DLL.)
Be sure to install and use the tiny stubdata library rather than the large data DLL. - Static libraries: It may make sense to build the ICU code
into static libraries (.a) rather than shared libraries (.so/.dll).
Static linking reduces the overall size of the binary by removing
code that is never called.
Example configure command line:
runConfigureICU Linux --enable-static --disable-shared - Out-of-source build: It is usually desirable to keep the ICU
source file tree clean and have build output files written to
a different location. This is called an "out-of-source build".
Simply invoke the configure script from the target location:
~/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
ICU as a System-Level Library
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.
- Data path: For a system-level library, it is best to load
ICU data from the .dat package file because the file system path
to the .dat package file can be hardcoded. ICU will automatically set
the path to the final install location using U_ICU_DATA_DEFAULT_DIR.
Alternatively, you can set
-DICU_DATA_DIR=/path/to/icu/datawhen building the ICU code. (Used by source/common/putil.c.)
Consider also setting-DICU_NO_USER_DATA_OVERRIDEif you do not want the "ICU_DATA" environment variable to be used. (An application can still override the data path viau_setDataDirectory()orudata_setCommonData(). - Hide draft API: API marked with
@draftis new and not yet stable. Applications must not rely on unstable APIs from a system-level library. DefineU_HIDE_DRAFT_API,U_HIDE_INTERNAL_APIandU_HIDE_SYSTEM_APIby modifying unicode/utypes.h before installing it. - Only C APIs: Applications must not rely on C++ APIs from a
system-level library because binary C++ compatibility
across library and compiler versions is very hard to achieve.
Most ICU C++ APIs are in header files that contain a comment with
\brief C++ API. Consider not installing these header files. - Disable renaming: By default, ICU library entry point names
have an ICU version suffix. Turn this off for a system-level installation,
to enable upgrading ICU without breaking applications. For example:
runConfigureICU Linux --disable-renaming
The public header files from this configuration must be installed for applications to include and get the correct entry point names.
User-Configurable Settings
ICU4C can be customized via a number of user-configurable settings.
Many of them are controlled by preprocessor macros which are
defined in the source/common/unicode/uconfig.h header file.
Some turn off parts of ICU, for example conversion or collation,
trading off a smaller library for reduced functionality.
Other settings are recommended (see previous section)
but their default values are set for better source code compatibility.
In order to change such user-configurable settings, you can
either modify the uconfig.h header file by adding
a specific #define ... for one or more of the macros
before they are first tested,
or set the compiler's preprocessor flags (CPPFLAGS) to include
an equivalent -D macro definition.
How To Build And Install On Windows
Building International Components for Unicode requires:
- Microsoft Windows
- Microsoft Visual C++
- Cygwin is required when other versions of Microsoft Visual C++ and other compilers are used to build ICU.
The steps are:
- Unzip the icu-XXXX.zip file into any convenient location. Using command line zip, type "unzip -a icu-XXXX.zip -d drive:\directory", or just use WinZip.
- Be sure that the ICU binary directory, <ICU>\bin\, is included in the PATH environment variable. The tests will not work without the location of the ICU DLL files in the path.
- Open the "<ICU>\source\allinone\allinone.sln" workspace file in Microsoft Visual Studio. (This solution includes all the International Components for Unicode libraries, necessary ICU building tools, and the test suite projects). Please see the command line note below if you want to build from the command line instead.
- Set the active platform to "Win32" or "x64" (See Windows platform note below) and configuration to "Debug" or "Release" (See Windows configuration note below).
- Choose the "Build" menu and select "Rebuild Solution". If you want to build the Debug and Release at the same time, see the batch configuration note below.
- Run the tests. They can be run from the command line or from within Visual Studio.
Running the Tests from the Windows Command Line (cmd)
- For x86 (32 bit) and Debug, use:
<ICU>\source\allinone\icucheck.bat Platform Configuration
- So, for example:
<ICU>\source\allinone\icucheck.bat x86 Debug
or
<ICU>\source\allinone\icucheck.bat x86 Release
or
<ICU>\source\allinone\icucheck.bat x64 Release
Running the Tests from within Visual Studio
- Run the C++ test suite, "intltest". To do this: set the active startup project to "intltest", and press Ctrl+F5 to run it. Make sure that it passes without any errors.
- Run the C test suite, "cintltst". To do this: set the active startup project to "cintltst", and press Ctrl+F5 to run it. Make sure that it passes without any errors.
- Run the I/O test suite, "iotest". To do this: set the active startup project to "iotest", and press Ctrl+F5 to run it. Make sure that it passes without any errors.
- For x86 (32 bit) and Debug, use:
- You are now able to develop applications with ICU by using the libraries and tools in <ICU>\bin\. The headers are in <ICU>\include\ and the link libraries are in <ICU>\lib\. To install the ICU runtime on a machine, or ship it with your application, copy the needed components from <ICU>\bin\ to a location on the system PATH or to your application directory.
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:
- Choose "Build" menu, select "Configuration Manager...", and select "Win32" or "x64" for the Active Platform Solution.
- Another way is to select the desired build configuration from "Solution Platforms" dropdown menu from the standard toolbar. It will say "Win32" or "x64" in the dropdown list.
Setting Active Configuration Note: To set the active configuration, two different possibilities are:
- Choose "Build" menu, select "Configuration Manager...", and select "Release" or "Debug" for the Active Configuration Solution.
- Another way is to select the desired build configuration from "Solution Configurations" dropdown menu from the standard toolbar. It will say "Release" or "Debug" in the dropdown list.
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.
How To Build And Install On Windows with Cygwin
Building International Components for Unicode with this configuration requires:
- Microsoft Windows
- Microsoft Visual C++ (when gcc isn't used).
-
Cygwin with the following installed:
- bash
- GNU make
- ar
- ranlib
- man (if you plan to look at the man pages)
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:
- Start the Windows "Command Prompt" window. This is different from the gcc build, which requires the Cygwin Bash command prompt. The Microsoft Visual C++ compiler will not work with a bash command prompt.
- If the computer isn't set up to use Visual C++ from the command line,
you need to run vcvars32.bat.
For example:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat" can be used for 32-bit builds or
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\amd64\vcvarsamd64.bat" can be used for 64-bit builds on Windows x64. - Unzip the icu-XXXX.zip file into any convenient location. Using command line zip, type "unzip -a icu-XXXX.zip -d drive:\directory", or just use WinZip.
- Change directory to "icu/source", which is where you unzipped ICU.
- Run "bash ./runConfigureICU Cygwin/MSVC" (See Windows configuration note and non-functional configure options below).
- Type "make" to compile the libraries and all the data files. This make command should be GNU make.
- Optionally, type "make check" to run the test suite, which checks for ICU's functionality integrity (See testing note below).
- Type "make install" to install ICU. If you used the --prefix= option on configure or runConfigureICU, ICU will be installed to the directory you specified. (See installation note below).
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.
- --disable-renaming
- --disable-threading (This flag does disable threading in ICU, but the resulting ICU library will still be linked with MSVC's multithread DLL)
- --enable-tracing
- --enable-rpath
- --with-iostream
- --enable-static (Requires that U_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION be defined in user code that links against ICU's static libraries.)
- --with-data-packaging=files (The pkgdata tool currently does not work in this mode. Manual packaging is required to use this mode.)
How To Build And Install On UNIX
Building International Components for Unicode on UNIX requires:
- A C++ compiler installed on the target machine (for example: gcc, CC, xlC_r, aCC, cxx, etc...).
- An ANSI C compiler installed on the target machine (for example: cc).
- A recent version of GNU make (3.80+).
- For a list of z/OS tools please view the z/OS build section of this document for further details.
Here are the steps to build ICU:
- Decompress the icu-X.Y.tgz (or icu-X.Y.tar.gz) file. For example, "gunzip -d < icu-X.Y.tgz | tar xvf -"
- Change directory to the "icu/source".
- Run "chmod +x runConfigureICU configure install-sh" because these files may have the wrong permissions.
- Run the runConfigureICU script for your platform. (See configuration note below).
- Type "gmake" (or "make" if GNU make is the default make on your platform) to compile the libraries and all the data files. The proper name of the GNU make command is printed at the end of the configuration run, as in "You must use gmake to compile ICU".
- Optionally, type "gmake check" to run the test suite, which checks for ICU's functionality integrity (See testing note below).
- Type "gmake install" to install ICU. If you used the --prefix= option on configure or runConfigureICU, ICU will be installed to the directory you specified. (See installation note below).
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).
How To Build And Install On z/OS (OS/390)
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:
- The makedep and GNU make tools are required for building ICU. If it is not already installed on your system, it is available at the z/OS UNIX - Tools and Toys site. The PATH environment variable should be updated to contain the location of this executable prior to build. Failure to add these tools to your PATH will cause ICU build failures or cause pkgdata to fail to run.
- Since USS does not support using the mmap() function over NFS, it is recommended that you build ICU on a local filesystem. Once ICU has been built, you should not have this problem while using ICU when the data library has been built as a shared library, which is this is the default setting.
- Encoding considerations: The source code assumes that it is compiled with codepage ibm-1047 (to be exact, the UNIX System Services variant of it). The pax command converts all of the source code files from ASCII to codepage ibm-1047 (USS) EBCDIC. However, some files are binary files and must not be converted, or must be converted back to their original state. You can use the unpax-icu.sh script to do this for you automatically. It will unpackage the tar file and convert all the necessary files for you automatically.
- z/OS supports both native S/390 hexadecimal floating point and (with OS/390 2.6 and later) IEEE 754 binary floating point. This is a compile time option. Applications built with IEEE should use ICU DLLs that are built with IEEE (and vice versa). The environment variable IEEE390=0 will cause the z/OS version of ICU to be built without IEEE floating point support and use the native hexadecimal floating point. By default ICU is built with IEEE 754 support. Native floating point support is sufficient for codepage conversion, resource bundle and UnicodeString operations, but the Format APIs require IEEE binary floating point.
- z/OS introduced the concept of Extra Performance Linkage (XPLINK) to
bring performance improvement opportunities to call-intensive C and C++
applications such as ICU. XPLINK is enabled on a DLL-by-DLL basis, so if
you are considering using XPLINK in your application that uses ICU, you
should consider building the XPLINK-enabled version of ICU. You need to
set ICU's environment variable
OS390_XPLINK=1prior 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. - Currently in ICU 3.0, there is an issue with building on z/OS without
XPLINK and with the C++ iostream. By default, the iostream library on z/OS
is XPLINK enabled. If you are not building an XPLINK enabled version of
ICU, you should use the
--with-iostream=oldconfigure option when using runConfigureICU. This will prevent applications that use the icuio library from crashing. - Also note that on current versions of z/OS, the XPLINK version (C128) of the
C++ standard library is standard. Therefore you may see an error when running
with XPLINK disabled. To avoid this error, set the following environment variable or similar:
export _CXX_PSYSIX="CEE.SCEELIB(C128N)":"CBC.SCLBSID(IOSTREAM,COMPLEX)"
- The rest of the instructions for building and testing ICU on z/OS with UNIX System Services are the same as the How To Build And Install On UNIX section.
z/OS (Batch/PDS) support outside the UNIX system services environment
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
How To Build And Install On The IBM i Family (IBM i, i5/OS OS/400)
Before you start building ICU, ICU requires the following:
- QSHELL interpreter installed (install base option 30, operating system)
- ILE C/C++ Compiler installed on the system
- The latest IBM tools for Developers for IBM i — http://www.ibm.com/servers/enable/site/porting/tools/
The following describes how to setup and build ICU. For background information, you should look at the UNIX build instructions.
-
Create target library. This library will be the target for the
resulting modules, programs and service programs. You will specify this
library on the OUTPUTDIR environment variable.
CRTLIB LIB(libraryname) ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(OUTPUTDIR) VALUE('libraryname') REPLACE(*YES) -
Set up the following environment variables and job characteristics in your build process
ADDENVVAR ENVVAR(MAKE) VALUE('gmake') REPLACE(*YES) CHGJOB CCSID(37) - Run 'QSH'
- Run:
export PATH=/QIBM/ProdData/DeveloperTools/qsh/bin:$PATH:/QOpenSys/usr/bin - Run gzip -d on the ICU source code compressed tar archive (icu-X.Y.tgz).
- Run unpax-icu.sh on the tar file generated from the previous step.
- Change your current directory to icu/as_is/os400.
- Run qsh bldiculd.sh to build the program ICULD which ICU will use for linkage.
- Change your current directory to icu/source.
- Run './runConfigureICU IBMi' (See configuration note for details). Note that --with-data-packaging=archive and setting the --prefix are recommended, building in default (dll) mode is currently not supported.
- Run 'gmake' to build ICU. (Do not use the -j option)
- Run 'gmake check QIBM_MULTI_THREADED=Y' to build and run the tests. You can look at the iSeries Information Center for more details regarding the running of multiple threads on IBM i.
How To Cross Compile ICU
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/headless system (such as an embedded device), or a system where you can't easily run the ICU command line tools (any non-UNIX-like system).
To reduce confusion, we will here refer to the "A" and the "B" system.System "A" is the actual system we will be running on- the only requirements on it is are it is able to build ICU from the command line targetting itself (with configure or runConfigureICU), and secondly, that it also contain the correct toolchain for compiling and linking for the resultant platform, referred to as the "B" system.
The autoconf docs use the term "build" for A, and "host" for B. More details at: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/html_node/Specifying-Names.html
Three initially-empty directories will be used in this example:
| /icu | a copy of the ICU source |
|---|---|
| /buildA | an empty directory, it will contain ICU built for A (MacOSX in this case) |
| /buildB | an empty directory, it will contain ICU built for B (HaikuOS in this case) |
- Check out or unpack the ICU source code into the /icu directory.You will have the directories /icu/source, etc.
- Build ICU in /buildA normally (using runConfigureICU or configure):
cd /buildA sh /icu/source/runConfigureICU MacOSX gnumake
- Set PATH or other variables as needed, such as CPPFLAGS.
- Build ICU in /buildB
Note: "--with-cross-build" takes an absolute path.cd /buildB sh /icu/source/configure --host=i586-pc-haiku --with-cross-build=/buildA gnumake
- Tests and testdata can be built with "gnumake tests".
How To Package ICU
There are many ways that a person can package ICU with their software products. Usually only the libraries need to be considered for packaging.
On UNIX, you should use "gmake install" to make it easier to develop and package ICU. The bin, lib and include directories are needed to develop applications that use ICU. These directories will be created relative to the "--prefix=dir" configure option (See the UNIX build instructions). When ICU is built on Windows, a similar directory structure is built.
When changes have been made to the standard ICU distribution, it is recommended that at least one of the following guidelines be followed for special packaging.
- Add a suffix name to the library names. This can be done with the --with-library-suffix configure option.
- The installation script should install the ICU libraries into the application's directory.
Following these guidelines prevents other applications that use a standard ICU distribution from conflicting with any libraries that you need. On operating systems that do not have a standard C++ ABI (name mangling) for compilers, it is recommended to do this special packaging anyway. More details on customizing ICU are available in the User's Guide. The ICU Source Code Organization section of this readme.html gives a more complete description of the libraries.
| Library Name | Windows Filename | Linux Filename | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data Library | icudtXYl.dll | libicudata.so.XY.Z | Data required by the Common and I18n libraries. There are many ways to package and customize this data, but by default this is all you need. |
| Common Library | icuucXY.dll | libicuuc.so.XY.Z | Base library required by all other ICU libraries. |
| Internationalization (i18n) Library | icuinXY.dll | libicui18n.so.XY.Z | A library that contains many locale based internationalization (i18n) functions. |
| Layout Engine | iculeXY.dll | libicule.so.XY.Z | An optional engine for doing font layout. |
| Layout Extensions Engine | iculxXY.dll | libiculx.so.XY.Z | An optional engine for doing font layout that uses parts of ICU. |
| ICU I/O (Unicode stdio) Library | icuioXY.dll | libicuio.so.XY.Z | An optional library that provides a stdio like API with Unicode support. |
| Tool Utility Library | icutuXY.dll | libicutu.so.XY.Z | An internal library that contains internal APIs that are only used by ICU's tools. If you do not use ICU's tools, you do not need this library. |
Normally only the above ICU libraries need to be considered for packaging. The versionless symbolic links to these libraries are only needed for easier development. The X, Y and Z parts of the name are the version numbers of ICU. For example, ICU 2.0.2 would have the name libicuuc.so.20.2 for the common library. The exact format of the library names can vary between platforms due to how each platform can handles library versioning.
Important Notes About Using ICU
Using ICU in a Multithreaded Environment
Some versions of ICU require calling the u_init() function
from uclean.h to ensure that ICU is initialized properly. In
those ICU versions, u_init() must be called before ICU is used
from multiple threads. There is no harm in calling u_init() in a
single-threaded application, on a single-CPU machine, or in other cases where
u_init() is not required.
In addition to ensuring thread safety, u_init() also attempts
to load at least one ICU data file. Assuming that all data files are packaged
together (or are in the same folder in files mode), a failure code from
u_init() usually means that the data cannot be found. In this
case, the data may not be installed properly, or the application may have
failed to call udata_setCommonData() or
u_setDataDirectory() which specify to ICU where it can find its
data.
Since u_init() will load only one or two data files, it
cannot guarantee that all of the data that an application needs is available.
It cannot check for all data files because the set of files is customizable,
and some ICU services work without loading any data at all. An application
should always check for error codes when opening ICU service objects (using
ucnv_open(), ucol_open(), C++ constructors,
