Unicode® ICU 63 has just been released. It updates to CLDR 34 locale data with many additions and corrections, and some new languages. ICU adds an API for number and currency range formatting, and an API for additional Unicode properties and for constructing custom properties. CLDR and ICU include data for testing readiness for the upcoming Japanese calendar era.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode encoding standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/63.

Version 34 is the latest version of CLDR, the core open-source language data that major software systems use to adapt software to the conventions of over 80 different languages. CLDR data is used by many products for Unicode and language support, including Android, Cloudant, Chrome OS, Db2, iOS, macOS, Windows, and many others.

CLDR 34 included a full Survey Tool data collection phase increasing to 85 languages at the “modern” (full) level, 4 at the lower “moderate” level (suitable for document content), 18 at the basic level, and about 100 others that don’t meet the level requirements.

Among the other changes: new units were added (e.g., atmosphere, petabyte); many new emoji keywords and names were corrected/refined, with updated emoji sort order; and preparations for the New Japanese Era (affecting most software for Japan) were made. The specification was also updated with many changes for Unicode Locale Identifier and BCP 47 Conformance sections, plus defining the syntax of unit identifiers. For other changes, details, and links to documentation, see the CLDR 34 Release Notes.

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Adopt-a-Character

The alpha version of Unicode CLDR 34 is available for testing. The alpha period lasts until the beta release on September 26, which will include updates to the LDML spec. The final release is expected on October 10.

CLDR 34 provides an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. This data is used by all major software systems for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

CLDR 34 included a full Survey Tool data collection phase. Other enhancements include several changes to prepare for the new Japanese calendar era starting 2019-05-01; updated emoji names, annotations, collation and grouping; and other specific fixes. The draft release page at http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-34 lists the major features, and has pointers to the newest data and charts. It will be fleshed out over the coming weeks with more details, migration issues, known problems, and so on. Particularly useful for review are:

• Delta Charts - the data that changed during the release
• By-Type Charts - a side-by-side comparison of data from different locales
• Annotation Charts - new emoji names and keywords

Please report any problems that you find using a CLDR ticket. We'd also appreciate it if programmatic users of CLDR data download the xml files and do a trial integration to see if any problems arise.