Unicode

One of the worst mistakes to make is to write software that is not Unicode-enabled. Basically, Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. (http://www.unicode.org/). A really good quick explanation of Unicode is here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Unicode characters are used in URLs too, so make sure your code supports these:

• http://日立.com/ (Hitachi Japan)
• http://ايكيا‎.com (Arabic transliteration of IKEA)
• http://икеа.com (Russian transliteration of IKEA)
• http://宜家.com/ (IKEA China)

IDNs are supported by all modern browsers and email programs.

International Components for Unicode (ICU)

The International Components for Unicode (ICU) software consists of components (subroutines, modules) that are available as source code and portable to different operating systems. ICU was originally written in Java, and later support to C and C++ has been added. The Java version is called ICU4J, and the C and C++ version is ICU4C.

ICU contains software components for several purposes:

• Basic text: Unicode text handling, character properties, character code conversions
• Text analysis: Unicode regular expressions and characters, operations on collections of characters, and detection of word and line boundaries
• Sorting and searching: language-sensitive collation and searching
• Transformations: normalization forms, case mappings, transliterations
• Locales: general locale data and resource bundle architecture
• Complex text layout: Hebrew, Arabic, Indic, Thai
• Time and date: representation of and operations on dates and times in multiple calendars and time zones
• Formatting and parsing: reading and writing dates, times, numbers, currencies, messages, and rule-based patterns