The Unicode Blog: March 2026

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Unicode ICU 78.3 and CLDR 48.2 released

Unicode® CLDR is the most widely used provider of locale data. It provides the essential building blocks that allow software to display dates, times, and currencies correctly in every language and region. Unicode® ICU provides widely used C/C++/Java internationalization (i18n) libraries and APIs.

We have just published new maintenance releases of ICU and CLDR, with some small but significant changes. To find out more and to download these releases, go to:

CLDR and ICU have each published a maintenance release in March instead of a major release. The next major releases, CLDR 49 and ICU 79, are planned for October and will include the data from the next CLDR general submission period, planned to start in early Q2 2026, as well as Unicode 18.

The following issues are fixed in the CLDR 48.2 and ICU 78.3 maintenance releases:

Several important locale data bug fixes including:

Group separator for number formatting was updated to ' in fr_CH for consistency with other Swiss locales.
Some fixes to date and time formats including: Hv available formats were updated to match behavior in CLDR 47. The previous change caused web compatibility issues related to current JS capabilities.
Fixes for Emoji annotations issues, such as collisions between emoji short names.
Updated abbreviated and narrow AM/PM for ko and ps for consistency with how the wide forms are localized.
Full list of changes are available in Δ48.2

ICU 78.3 includes the CLDR 48.2 changes
ICU also fixes a C++ code point iterator bug
Updates for timezone data 2026a

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Tuesday, March 3, 2026

UTS #18: More Unicode Properties in Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions, or “Regex”, are the invisible workhorses of the digital world. Regex allows apps and computer systems to find, validate, and change text based on patterns rather than specific words. Unicode properties play a vital role in this. Rather than an application using a fixed list of characters like a-z, A-Z — and failing badly for all but English — Unicode properties take on the burden of supplying meaningful sets of characters, like letters, Greek characters, or Emoji. Properties can be combined, such as Greek letters with an expression like [\p{script=greek}&\p{letter}].

This specification has an update for now covering over 100 different properties. The following are the most important changes, with others found in the modification section.

Section 2.7 Full Properties lists the full set of properties recommended for support. This version adds: IDS_Unary_Operator, NFKC_Simple_Casefold, ID_Compat_Math_Start, ID_Compat_Math_Continue, Indic_Conjunct_Break, and RGI_Emoji_Qualification

Special rules called “matching rules” are used when looking up properties and their values by name. This version recommends the matching rules from Section 5.9 Matching Rules of UAX #44.

By expanding and refining property support in UTS #18, this update strengthens the foundation for global text processing.