Re: Multibyte strings

On 11 February 2022 07:26:45 CET, "Michał" <aaatoja@o2.pl> wrote: >Hi everyone. >It's a known fact that nowadays most websites use at least UTF-8 >encoding. Unfortunately PHP itself has stopped a bit in the previous >century. Is there any reason why the mbstring extension cannot be >introduced to core in the next major version (maybe preceded with a >deprecation message like it was with the mysql extension in v5)? All >functions from the standard library would become aliases for multibyte >equivalents. As others have said, any change to behaviour in something as subtle as string encoding makes little sense (see PHP 6 or the mess that was the migration from Python 2 to 3, which did exactly that). However, I do see an argument to be made to make the mbstring extension always available, similar to what was done with the json extension [1]. Currently, one cannot assume to have access to things like mb_strcut, which makes writing code that does not break when it's fed UTF-8 relatively complicated. Frameworks like Drupal also require mbstring for anything other than English content [2]. The manual [3] also says that it does not require any external libraries, so there does not seem to be any technical obstacle either. Would that be an option? Or am I missing some obvious reason that mbstring should not be always available, like licensing issues? Regards, Mel [1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/always_enable_json [2] https://www.drupal.org/docs/system-requirements/php-requirements#s-mbstring- [3] https://www.php.net/manual/en/mbstring.requirements.php