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<h1 class="title">Introduction</h1>
<p class="para">
Internationalization extension (further is referred as Intl) is a wrapper
for <a href="http://www.icu-project.org/" class="link external">» ICU</a>
library, enabling PHP programmers to perform
<a href="http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/" class="link external">» UCA</a>-conformant collation and
date/time/number/currency formatting in their scripts.
</p>
<p class="para">
It tends to closely follow ICU APIs, so that people having experience
working with ICU in either C/C++ or Java could easily use the PHP API.
Also, this way ICU documentation would be useful to understand various ICU
functions.
</p>
<p class="para">
Intl consists of several modules, each of them exposes the corresponding
ICU API:
</p>
<ul class="itemizedlist">
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Collator: provides string comparison capability with support for
appropriate locale-sensitive sort orderings.
</span>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Number Formatter: allows to display number according to the localized
format or given pattern or set of rules, and to parse strings into
numbers.
</span>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Message Formatter: allows to create messages incorporating data (such
as numbers or dates) formatted according to given pattern and locale
rules, and parse messages extracting data from them.
</span>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Normalizer: provides a function to transform text into one of the Unicode
normalization forms, and provides a routine to test if a given string is
already normalized.
</span>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Locale: provides interaction with locale identifiers in the form of
functions to get subtags from locale identifier; parse, compose,
match(lookup and filter) locale identifiers.
</span>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="section" id="intl.links">
<h2 class="title">Links</h2>
<ul class="itemizedlist">
<li class="listitem">
<p class="para"><a href="http://site.icu-project.org/docs/" class="link external">» Miscellaneous ICU docs</a></p>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<p class="para"><a href="http://www.icu-project.org/userguide/" class="link external">» ICU User Guide</a></p>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<p class="para"><a href="http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/" class="link external">» Unicode Collation Algorithm</a></p>
</li>
</ul>
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