Bug #71897 [Asn->Csd]: ASCII 0x7F Delete control character permitted in identifiers

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=71897&edit=1 ID: 71897 Updated by: ajf@php.net Reported by: ajf@php.net Summary: ASCII 0x7F Delete control character permitted in identifiers -Status: Assigned +Status: Closed Type: Bug Package: Scripting Engine problem Operating System: * PHP Version: Irrelevant Assigned To: ajf Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: Automatic comment on behalf of ajf@ajf.me Revision: http://git.php.net/?p=php-src.git;a=commit;h=660e88c19d98b8353995d750940d8513bfeca85f Log: Fix bug #71897 Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2016-03-25 12:02:21] ajf@php.net I can't find anything that matters where \x7F isn't DEL. The 7-bit ASCII-like encodings based on ISO 646 all leave it alone. The 8-bit ASCII-superset encodings of ISO/IEC 8859 all leave it alone. The Japanese standards leave it alone. It'd be surprising if any ASCII-compatible encoding changed \x7F's meaning, too. So I think this was simply a mistake. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2016-03-25 11:22:31] ajf@php.net A correction: \x7F doesn't hide the preceding character, at least not in my terminal emulator. I think I was confusing it with \x08 (ASCII Backspace). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2016-03-25 10:47:53] ajf@php.net Description: ------------ Identifiers in PHP source code conform to the regex /[_a-zA-Z\x7F-\xFF][_0-9a-zA-Z\x7F-\xFF]*/. Most of this regex is pretty standard: it allows alphanumeric ASCII characters and underscores, plus any character with the 8th bit set (presumably to allow any extension of ASCII, such as Latin-1 or UTF-8, to be used). But there's one part of this I find rather curious: why is \x7F included? It's not a high-byte/8-bit character, it's a 7-bit ASCII character, and a control character at that. Unless there's some ASCII extension which reuses that value as a printing character, I assume it must be a mistake to include this character. As a control character, it is invisible and difficult to type. Worse, if you were to include it within an identifier, it would hide the preceding printing character (because \x7F moves the cursor back one column in terminal emulators). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=71897&edit=1