Allows for 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 library, the package provides R users with platform-independent functions known to Java, Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby programmers. Among available features there are: pattern searching (e.g. via regular expressions), random string generation, string collation, transliteration, concatenation, date-time formatting and parsing, etc.