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Status Submitted
Workspace IBM i
Categories Languages - RPG
Created by Guest
Created on May 8, 2024

create a BIF for transliteration/transform facility (ICU BASED)

String replacement and transliteration is an extremely common task in business applications and communication to external parties in international settings.

This produce a lot of custom code (and a lot of substandard one) in IBM shops. To do it properly and in a standard way one must leverage a commonly used library like ICU (used in a lot of systems) and created by IBM itself.


Please provide a BIF to leverage the ICU (QICU library already in the IBMi system, please update the SRVPGM there also) transliteration/transform facility.


The RPG BIF will support standard tasks on unicode strings like

  • Common transliteration i.e. биологическом -> biologichyeskom

  • Accents or signs removale i.e. Katálogos -> Katalogs

  • Special characters removal based on unicode class attributes (i.e. separators)

  • Reduce unicode to ASCII set.

  • etc.

see https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/transforms/general/


use:


s = %UTRANS('NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFC;' : 'άmyèxàmplé' )


will apply the transform in the first parameter to the source string returning the result in s


s will contain


'αmyexample'


allowing a public easy access to the transform engine will allow to produce robust international software reusing the effort of the ICU team (ICU4C exposed as SRVPGM).



Idea priority High