ICU 73.2 & CLDR 43.1 released: GB18030 compliance updates & compatibility fixes

Unicode® ICU 73.2 and CLDR 43.1 have just been released.

• ICU is the premier library for software internationalization, used by a wide array of companies and organizations to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode Standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).
  
• CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages (dates, times, numbers, sort-order, etc.). All major browsers and all modern mobile phones use CLDR for language support. (See Who uses CLDR?)
  

There are significant changes for GB18030-2022 compliance support:

• CLDR extends the support for “short” Chinese sort orders to cover some additional, required characters for Level 2. This is carried over into ICU collation.
  
• ICU has a modified character conversion table, mapping some GB18030 characters to Unicode characters that were encoded after GB18030-2005.
  

There are also changes for compatibility:

• There are optional variants of time formats with AM/PM (only for English) using ASCII spaces in CLDR that can also be used in ICU via custom data generation. This is intended to help certain implementers transition to the improved patterns, which have used a narrow no-break space between the time and AM/PM since CLDR 42.
  
  • For how to generate ICU data with this option, look for alt="ascii" on tools/cldr/cldr-to-icu/README.md
• The changes to the word segmentation behavior of @ sign that were in CLDR 42 (ICU 72) have been reverted. These caused problems for certain parsers that did not expect @ to join to letters.
  

ICU 73.2 updates to CLDR 43.1 locale data. These are maintenance releases for ICU 73 and CLDR 43, with limited sets of bug fixes and no API or structural changes. ICU 73.2 and CLDR 43.1 include several other bug fixes, including person name formatting, and Cyrillic transforms.

For details, please see:

• ICU 73.2 Release Note: ICU 73.2 maintenance release
  
• CLDR 43.1 Release Note: Version 43.1 Changes
  

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