Re: Re: PHP Unicode support design document

On Aug 10, 2005, at 3:45 AM, Ron Korving wrote:

This looks very promising, I'm impressed by the work you guys have done (big thumbs up).

Thanks.

What about the other functions that output to stdout directly, such as readfile() and passthru()?

readfile() uses streams so it would rely on stream filters and such. passthru() should probably operate in binary mode.

Maybe it would be a nice feature to have an U_INVALID_EXCEPTION, so that users can actually catch the error and deal with it. Just an idea. Of course it's not usual for the PHP core and extensions to throw exceptions, but perhaps this could change with PHP6.

I think the feature of raising exceptions vs. errors is orthogonal to what the switch does. Consider that you may want the skip/substitute/escape performed and then raise an error or not.

The b-prefix for binary strings is great, but how does that work with a function like file_get_contents() or fread() ? One can't do: $data = bfile_get_contents("somefile.bin"); And even if one could (somehow), wouldn't file_get_contents() already unicode-encode all data it reads? How does such a function know if the user is expecting binary or textual data or does the encoding simply happen after the string is returned? In that case it's up to the user to use the b-prefix, but then there's the syntax problem I mentioned.

'b' prefix is only for string literals. file_get_contents(), fread() and other streams-based functions use the default stream semantics, meaning that unless you change the default context, the data returned by them will be of IS_BINARY type. The default context can contain a filter that decodes the data from the specified encoding into Unicode. -Andrei