[icu-support] ICU 73.2 Released: GB18030 compliance updates & compatibility fixes

[Markus S. <mar...@gm...>]

Dear friends and users of ICU,

We are pleased to announce the release of Unicode® ICU 73.2. It updates to CLDR
43.1 <https://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-43#h.qobmda543waj>
locale data with various additions and corrections. These are maintenance
releases for ICU 73 and CLDR 43, with limited sets of bug fixes and no API
or structural changes.

There are significant changes for GB18030-2022
<https://ken-lunde.medium.com/the-gb-18030-2022-standard-3d0ebaeb4132>
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
   <https://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-42#h.ck7cpcrqqrq0>.
   -

      For how to generate ICU data with this option, look for alt="ascii"
      on tools/cldr/cldr-to-icu/README.md
      <https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/main/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 and CLDR 43.1 include several other bug fixes, including person
name formatting, and Cyrillic transforms.

For details, please see https://icu.unicode.org/download/73.

Best regards,

Markus Scherer for the ICU Project