Supported Libraries

Spectrum™ Technology Platform provides an ASCII and Unicode version C API, while the Unicode version remains as compatible as possible with the original ASCII-version API design. Spectrum™ Technology Platform applies International Components for Unicode (ICU) in the API to support the Unicode feature. ICU is a mature, widely used set of C/C++ libraries for Unicode support and is developed by IBM.

The Unicode standard defines a default encoding based on 16-bit code units. This is supported in ICU by the definition of the UChar to be an unsigned 16-bit integer type (unsigned short *). This is the base type for character arrays for strings in ICU. Spectrum™ Technology Platform uses UChar as the Unicode string representation in our C API.

Note: Not all services support the full Unicode character set. For example, the ValidateAddress service supports the ISO 8859-1 character set for US input and international input and output, and the CP 850 character set for Canadian input and output. However, the Unicode libraries should be used whenever your input data may contain any non-ASCII character, even if the underlying service does not support the full Unicode character set.

For detailed information about UChar, please refer to the following two sites: