Internationalization

Character handling in J2SE 1.4.0 is based on version 3.0 of the Unicode standard. This character handling affects the Character and String classes in the java.lang package as well as the collation and bidirectional text analysis functionality in the java.text package.

J2SE 1.4.0 supports Thai and Hindi in all areas of functionality. See the Supported Locales document online for complete information on supported locales and writing systems.

Class java.util.Currency was introduced so that currencies can be referenced independent of locales. There are new methods on java.text.NumberFormat and related classes to specify the currency for formatting monetary values.