Fast, correct, consistent, portable, as well as convenient character string/text processing in every locale and any native encoding. Owing to the use of the 'ICU' (International Components for Unicode) library, the package provides 'R' users with platform-independent functions known to 'Java', 'Perl', 'Python', 'PHP', and 'Ruby' programmers. Available features include: pattern searching (e.g., with 'Java'-like regular expressions or the 'Unicode' collation algorithm), random string generation, case mapping, string transliteration, concatenation, Unicode normalization, date-time formatting and parsing, and many more.