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Intl

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Steven R. Loomis edited this page Sep 2, 2014 · 25 revisions

Note: these instructions are being provisionally added to this page. This information depends on https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/7719 landing, which see.

What is Intl?

The Intl object is available when EcmaScript 402 support is enabled. Node.js uses ICU4C to implement the Intl object natively.

Unix/Macintosh: Using a pre-built ICU (system-icu)

The Intl package can use an ICU which is already built.

Installing a pre-built ICU

Here are some ways to obtain a pre-built ICU:

From a package manager

Run one of these or similar as appropriate for your system:

 apt-get install libicu-dev
 yum install libicu-dev

Building ICU yourself

  • Download ICU source http://icu-project.org/download

  • Follow the enclosed readme.html to build ICU, particularly paying attention to the --prefix argument

  • build ICU and then:

    make install

Verify an installed ICU

 pkg-config --modversion icu-i18n

If this command fails, node will not be able to find the installed ICU. Verify that the PKG_CONFIG_PATH points to the newly installed icu-i18n.pc file

Configure node

 ./configure --with-intl=system-icu
  • Download the latest icu4c-##.#-src.tgz (or .zip)
  • Unpack the source as deps/icu (you should have deps/icu/source/...)

Building node with an embedded ICU

Download ICU source

First: Unpack latest ICU icu4c-##.#-src.tgz (or .zip) as deps/icu (You'll have: deps/icu/source/...)

Unix/Macintosh

  • ./configure ... --with-intl=full-icu

Or, to build the "small" variant (English only):

  • ./configure ... --with-intl=small-icu

Windows

  • vsbuild.bat ... full-icu

Or, to build the "small" variant (English only):

  • vsbuild.bat ... small-icu

Using the "small" build

  • If you didn't build with full ICU, you can provide additional data at runtime.
    • Two methods:
      • The NODE_ICU_DATA env variable: env NODE_ICU_DATA=/some/path node
      • The --icu-data-dir parameter: node --icu-data-dir=/some/path
    • Example: If you use the path /some/path, then ICU 53 on Little Endian (l) finds:
      • individual files such as /some/path/icudt53l/root.res
      • a packaged data file /some/path/icudt53l.dat
    • Notes:
      • See u_setDataDirectory() and the ICU Users Guide for many more details.
      • "53l" will be "53b" on a big endian machine.

Verifying an Intl build

  • btest402.js is a very basic test of whether Intl is built correctly.

Using Intl build

Building using Chromium's ICU

Note: this build is missing some locales, is an older revision, and has a larger output size. It is included here for completeness.

svn checkout --force --revision 214189 \
    http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/deps/third_party/icu46 \
    deps/v8/third_party/icu46
./configure --with-icu-path=deps/v8/third_party/icu46/icu.gyp
make
make install

FAQ

  • none (yet!)
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