Note: This is a development milestone release of ICU 49. This milestone is intended for those wishing to get an early look at ICU 49 new features and API changes. It is not recommended for production use.

Description

Note: We are changing the ICU release version numbering, combining the first two fields into one. The next release after ICU 4.8 will be ICU 49 then ICU 50 etc.

Major changes since ICU 4.8 include the following:

Common Changes

• Unicode 6.1 beta: New scripts & blocks; changes to grapheme break & line break property values; some characters change from symbol to Po or No; etc.
• CLDR 21 milestone 2: Changes in segmentation data to match Unicode 6.1; new calendar structures for support of Chinese calendar; new ar_001 locale for Modern Standard Arabic; deprecation of "commonlyUsed" element in timezone names; removal of "whole-locale" aliases.
• Normalizer2 API additions
• Easier-to-use getInstance() variants; e.g., getNFDInstance() (#8246)
• Getter for the combining-class value for a code point (#8606)
• Getter for the raw Decomposition_Mapping (#8804)
• Pairwise composition (#8804)
• TimeZone class: (C++) Getter for unknown time zone, (Java) fields for GMT & unknown zone (#8779)
• Support for deprecation of the "commonlyUsed" element for CLDR metazones (#8811)
• DateTImePatternGenerator can now use separate patterns for skeletons that differ only in MMM vs MMMM or EEE vs EEEE,  etc. (#7930)

ICU4C Specific Changes

• One platform.h file used on all platforms now (#8452)
• Smaller binaries with static-linked ICU (#8453)
• Explicit constructors in UnicodeString (#7877)
• Option for not including utf headers (#8575)
• Added function u_printf (#8579)
• C++ namespace support (#8680)
• Format and parse Chinese calendar dates including support for intercalary months (#8958)
• DateFormat/SimpleDateFormat format/parse const methods are really const now (#8844)

ICU4J Specific Changes

• Default ULocale sensitive to user.script system property even on Java 5 & 6 (#8446)
• TimeZone is now Freezable; getFrozenTimeZone() (#8345)
• APIs for TimeZoneNames and TimeZoneFormat (#8512)
• Add getMaxBytesForString to CharsetEncoderICU (#8515)
• Support for Java 7 Locale Category (#8630) [Already back ported to ICU4J 4.4.2.2/4.6.1.1/4.8.1.1]
  
• A new utility class MessagePatternUtil supporting MessagePattern tree structure analysis (#8745)

ICU4C Download

• API Changes since ICU4C 4.8
• Readme