Re: [RFC] Deprecate and Remove utf8_encode and utf8_decode

On Sun, 20 Feb 2022 at 23:12, Rowan Tommins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> wrote: > I don't have hard facts to back it up, but my impression is that > ext/mbstring is quite commonly installed, and required by apps and > libraries. Unlike the other two, it has no system dependencies, because > the implementation is entirely in PHP's source tree. > Thanks for confirming those details Rowan. I'm just wondering, and this would not be necessary... considering how most systems need to deal with UTF-8 data today, could an argument be made for enabling etc/mbstring by default? I'm fairly sure Ubuntu and CentOS need to install the package php-mbstring separately; whereas my limited experience with cheep/shared hosting, they tend to have it enabled. Then mb_convert_encoding() could become the default suggested alternative, and everyone could trust functions like mb_strlen() are available as well. Just for my own interest - technically mbstring uses libmbfl, but that's already available from /ext/mbstring/libmbfl/ Craig