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iLib

iLib is an internationalization library written in pure ES5 Javascript. It does not require any other libraries to function, and can run equally well in various older and newer browsers, on various OS's (including mobile), nodejs, webOS, Qt/QML, RingoJS, React/Enact, or rhino/nashorn.

More elaborate documentation can be found here

What Can iLib Do?

iLib contains many classes that cover a large number of i18n topics, a lot more than almost all other JS i18n libraries.

  • String translation (ResBundle)
  • String formatting, including plurals/choice formats (IString)
  • Character type functions (like the C/C++ ctype functions) (CType)
  • Calendars (CalendarFactory)
    • Gregorian, Julian, ThaiSolar, Persian algorithmic, Persian astronomical, Hebrew, Arabic civil, Ethiopic, Coptic, Chinese Han
  • Date and time representation and conversion to other calendars (DateFactory)
  • Date and time formatting in all calendars, including full time zone support (DateFmt)
  • Time zone information from IANA TZ database (TimeZone)
  • Duration formatting for lengths of events, videos, music, etc. (DurationFmt)
  • Date range formatting with specific start and end times (DateRngFmt)
  • Unicode character normalization using the Unicode Normalization Algorithm (NormString)
    • Also supports full character iteration (as opposed to Unicode character iteration)
  • Unicode glyph string iteration (GlyphString)
  • Number parsing (INumber) and numeric formatting, including percentages and currencies (NumFmt)
  • Units conversion, scaling, and formatting (lengths, volumes, temperature, velocity, etc.) (Measurement and UnitFmt)
  • Phone number parsing and normalization (PhoneNumber), geo-location (PhoneGeoLocator), and formatting (PhoneFmt)
  • Personal name parsing (Name) and formatting (NameFmt)
  • Mailing address parsing (Address) and formatting (AddressFmt)
  • Collation/sorting and sortkey generation (Collator)
  • Locale-sensitive upper- and lower-casing (CaseMapper)
  • Information about writing systems/scripts (ScriptInfo)
  • Information about currencies (Currency)
  • Information about locale settings such as default time zone, default calendar, use of 12 or 24-hour clock,
  • List formatting such as "Joe, Tom, and Steve" (ListFormatter)
  • Alphabetic index keeping. For example, it can be used to put names on a contact list into their corresponding letter buckets (AlphabeticIndex)

plus a lot more.

Only need some of that? That's okay, there's a way to make smaller versions of ilib that only include the classes you need and only the locales you need using webpack.

What Locales Does it Support?

In short: almost any that you can think of.

For most classes, it supports all locales that are in the Unicode CLDR (see http://cldr.unicode.org), which means hundreds. Since language settings are separate from region settings, the arbitrary combinations of those can reach well into the thousands. For those classes of information where CLDR does not have info yet (such as phone formats), there is a much smaller set of locales that are supported, but for all classes, the top most used locales on the Internet are represented.

Where Does it Run?

ILib has been tested in the following environments:

  • nodejs 0.10+
  • Browsers:
    • Chrome 28+
    • Firefox 35+
    • Opera 12.16+
    • Safari 6+
    • Internet Explorer 8+
  • Rhino on JDK 1.7+ and 1.8 with Trireme (0.8.5)
  • RingoJS 0.11+
  • Qt 5.4+

Those environments have been tested on the following platforms where possible:

  • Ubuntu 12.04+
  • Windows 7 & 8
  • Mac OSX 10.04+
  • Android
  • iOS

Example of Using iLib Under NodeJS or RingoJS

iLib is a regular node module and can therefore be loaded using the built-in nodejs require() function. Here is an example of using iLib to format the current date/time for Berlin, Germany. This same example works equally well with ringojs running on rhino in a Java-based app server.

var DateFactory = require("ilib/lib/DateFactory.js");
var DateFmt = require("ilib/lib/DateFmt.js");

var d = DateFactory();
var f = new DateFmt({
	locale: "de-DE",
    type: "datetime",
    length: "long",
    timezone: "Europe/Berlin"
});

f.format(d);

Result would be:

'07:45 06. Nov. 2014'

Other iLib Support

Prepackaged iLib

If you would like to run ilib in your webapp, you can use the pre-webpacked versions of ilib in the releases page on github.

Webpack

If you already use webpack for your own project, you can use the ilib webpack loader and plugin to include ilib code and locale data into your own webpacked project. The advantage is that it will only include those ilib classes you are actually using and only the locale data for the locales you specify. That helps to minimize the file size of your webpack chunks. See the README documentation in the ilib webpack loader for more details.

No Webpack

If you do not use webpack for your own project, and yet you still want a minimal version of ilib, you can use the ilib scanner to scan your webapp code and create a webpack config that will build this minimal version for you. You can just include the resulting js files in your webapp. See the README for that project for details.

React

If you are using React in your project and would like to include ilib classes, you can use the webpack loader and plugin mentioned above to do so.

Additionally, there is a new library of React components called react-ilib that will eventually allow you to use all the ilib formatters as React components, such as an address formatting component that will output an address in the correct format per locale. It says "eventually" in the previous sentence because the project is new and there is a lot left to code.

React-ilib will also include a number of new components that allow you to do localized input form elements. For example, a localized address form component will present all of the fields necessary for an address in a number of different locales, along with the localized field labels and placeholder texts. The result of a user filling out the form would be an ilib Address instance, ready to use!

ES6

If you want to use ilib classes directly from ES6 instead of using React components, you can do that with the ilib-es6 project. With this library, you can use ilib asynchronously with promises instead of node-style callbacks, and you can import the classes in regular ES6 style. This library also works nicely in React if you want to call the ilib classes directly instead of using react-ilib components.

Localizing Your Strings

If you use ilib in your javascript project, you can use the loctool to extract the strings into XLIFF files that your translation vendor can translate directly. When you received the localized XLIFF files back again, you can then run the loctool again to generate localized assets, such as resource files that ilib's ResBundle class can use, or copies of HTML files with localized text in them. See the loctool documentation for more information.

Where to Get it

For node, you can simply install it using npm or yarn:

npm install ilib
yarn add ilib

For ringojs, you can install it with the ringo package manager:

rp install ilib

ILib is also available on github at https://github.com/iLib-js/iLib or official iLib builds in tar balls at https://github.com/iLib-js/iLib/releases

You can also build your own version from the sources using webpack. See the previous section about webpack for links.

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2011-2023, JEDLSoft

Ilib is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this library except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

More Documentation

More elaborate documentation can be found here.

Other Information

Please point your browser to the following places to get more documentation:

  • JSDocs: https://ilib-js.github.io/iLib/docs/api/jsdoc/index.html
  • Github: git clone git@github.com:iLib-js/iLib.git
  • Builds: https://github.com/iLib-js/iLib/releases
  • Wiki: https://github.com/iLib-js/iLib/wiki