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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 various locale-aware operations including
but not limited to formatting, transliteration, encoding conversion, calendar operations,
<a href="http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/" class="link external">» UCA</a>-conformant collation, locating
text boundaries and working with locale identifiers, timezones and graphemes,
</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. It can handle plurals,
locale-aware numbers, currencies, conditions and much more.
</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>
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Calendar: provides a class which could be used for locale-aware calendar operations
and getting various information such as timezone for locale chosen, first day of week
or if it's daylight saving time now.
</span>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Timezone: provides a wrapper around the <a href="http://www.iana.org/time-zones" class="link external">» "Olson" database</a>
which has information about all the timezones around the world.
</span>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Date formatter: allows to display date and time according to the localized
format or given pattern or set of rules, and to parse strings into
date and time.
</span>
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<span class="simpara">
Transliterator: allows getting latin representation of strings in various languages.
</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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