ICU

ICU

Emoji Ecosystem

International Components for Unicode — a widely-used open-source library providing Unicode and internationalization support, including emoji processing.

ICU is the reference implementation for Unicode algorithms. It provides C/C++ and Java libraries for text handling, including: character encoding conversion, text boundary analysis (critical for emoji grapheme clusters), collation (sorting), and locale-sensitive formatting.

Many platforms and languages use ICU internally: Node.js, Python, Android, macOS/iOS, and most web browsers. The `Intl.Segmenter` API in JavaScript, which correctly splits text including emoji, is typically backed by ICU.

ICU also provides emoji-aware text segmentation, which is essential for correctly counting and manipulating emoji in strings.

Related Terms

CLDR (CLDR) CLDR (CLDR)
The Common Locale Data Repository, a Unicode project providing locale-specific data including emoji names and search keywords in 100+ languages. Grapheme Cluster Grapheme Cluster
A user-perceived character that may be composed of multiple Unicode code points displayed as a single visual unit. Unicode Unicode
Universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to every character across all writing systems and symbol sets, including emoji.

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