#29711 [Fbk]: libxml and non iso-8859-1

ID: 29711 Updated by: derick@php.net Reported By: momo@php.net Status: Feedback Bug Type: XML related Operating System: ALL PHP Version: 5.0.1 New Comment: Oh come on, nobody uses PHP 5 yet :) For once do things right instead of half-assed solutions we've had for the past years because of BC issues. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-08-17 08:51:03] chregu@php.net It works for all correctly, which use iso-8859-1 (or similar or utf-8 in the iso-8859-1 space) source encoding or which did specify utf-8 as output encoding. So for the majority (I'd say), it works as expected, if we change default to UTF-8 (which would be of course the correct solution), it will break a lot of people's code. The encoding thingie in ext/xml in PHP 4 was always broken, IMHO. We unfortunately missed the chance to implement it more correctly with slight BC breaks for PHP 5.0.0... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-08-17 08:28:58] derick@php.net I'm for breaking it and make it output UTF-8 by default like the domxml stuff does. Consistency is a good thing and as it doesn't work "correctly" for 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 anyway I'd say we fix this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-08-17 08:19:25] chregu@php.net It's not a bug per se, it's more a BC break and/or documentation problem.. As libxml2 in PHP 5, detects the encoding automatically (which is anyway the correct behaviour), you don't have to specify it. Therefore, in PHP 5, the 1st parameter to xml_parser_create() only specifies the output encoding, which defaults to ISO-8859-1. If you specify "UTF-8" there, you at least get UTF-8 encoded strings and can convert them to Windows-1255. So, what to do now? If we change that behaviour (Output encoding defaults to iso-8859-1), we break BC to 5.0.0 and 5.0.1, if we leave it, it's a BC break to 4.x. But IMHO anyway the behaviour of PHP 4 was wrong (not respecting the source encoding specified in the XML document), on the other hand, defaulting to ISO-8859-1 was also not a very bright idea back then... I'm in favor of leaving as it is and clearly document it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-08-17 08:15:00] momo@php.net the external link give me the opportunity play with the html charset and make sure that all the readers see exactly what i see. anyway here the details: for the above script, the expact library used on php4, apply to "WINDOWS-1255" encoding as "ISO-8859-1" and do nothing with the chars. but libxml on the another hand, detect the "windows-1255" as known encoding, translate it to hebrew "UTF-8" using iconv for inner use and finally php corrupt it on http://cvs.php.net/co.php/php-src/ext/xml/xml.c?r=1.151#492 trying simply to convert it to "ISO-8859-1". To my opinion this behavior is a bug, if we knowing the source encoding, why not convert the UTF-8 back to the source encoding by default, using the internal iconv that was used for the reverse conversion? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-08-17 08:13:30] momo@php.net the external link give me the opportunity play with the html charset and make sure that all the readers see exactly what i see. anyway here the details: for the above script, the expact library used on php4, apply to "WINDOWS-1255" encoding as "ISO-8859-1" and do nothing with the chars. but libxml on the another hand, detect the "windows-1255" as known encoding, translate it to hebrew "UTF-8" using iconv for inner use and finally php corrupt it on http://cvs.php.net/co.php/php-src/ext/xml/xml.c?r=1.151#492 trying simply to convert it to "ISO-8859-1". To my opinion this behavior is a bug, if we knowing the source encoding, why not convert the UTF-8 back to the source encoding by default, using the internal iconv that was used for the reverse conversion? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at http://bugs.php.net/29711 -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=29711&edit=1