Provides classes and interfaces for handling text, dates, numbers, and messages in a manner independent of natural languages. This means your main application or applet can be written to be language-independent, and it can rely upon separate, dynamically-linked localized resources. This allows the flexibility of adding localizations for new localizations at any time.

These classes are capable of formatting dates, numbers, and messages, parsing; searching and sorting strings; and iterating over characters, words, sentences, and line breaks. This package contains three main groups of classes and interfaces:

- Classes for iteration over text
- Classes for formatting and parsing
- Classes for string collation

@since JDK1.1