Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Internationalization Support In Java

The entire Java platform is internationalized. Java provides an extensive library of classes and functions to help in internationalizing programs. Built-in I18n for Java comes with support for over 70 languages. I18n support comes for free or at very little cost.

All text in a running Java program is Unicode. Unicode was a brave effort to create a single character set that included every reasonable writing system. As a result the Unicode character set has support for almost every language script used in today’s world. Using this Unicode character set, Java provides a platform for Internationalization.

In Java the primitive type char is a single Unicode character. Similarly a String is a collection of these Unicode characters. All internal processing on text assumes the text to be in Unicode format.

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