Re: PHP Unicode extension in PHP6

On 23/05/07, Johannes Schlüter <johannes@php.net> wrote:

Hi Rangel, for PHP 6 the basic string type ist "unicode string" and most functions will accept these as primary type. But there are a few exceptions where unicode, for different reason, makes no sense. There you have to pass a binary string - an example is the mentioned urlencode(): It has to work on bytes to be reliable but it has no clue on the proper encoding so you need to tell that function "Yes the, I know about the meaning, just take this byte sequence". A good thing would be to check the archives where most reasons were posted before. johannes

For us users who have the luxury of not needing to deal with unicode, I expect that there is a steep learning curve in : 1 - Understanding why we need it. 2 - How we use it. 3 - Where does it all go wrong. 4 - How do we fix it when it does. In truth, if it all "just worked", there would be no problem. But nothing ever "just works". As someone who has been very happy with my ASCII character set, this whole thing seems extremely complicated and the potential for abuse, horrendous. I hope this is just FUD. It seems a LOT of effort has gone into unicode and it does seem that a lot of changes have had to be made. I'm all for improving and adhering to standards and even though I'm on the extreme fringe here, I believe adding Unicode is a good thing for PHP. But it will be needing a LOT of good quality documentation about this to help ISPs and Users. Its all well and good for a chosen few to understand the n'th degree of unicode, but a lot of the rest of us are in the dark on this. -- ----- Richard Quadling Zend Certified Engineer : http://zend.com/zce.php?c=ZEND002498&r=213474731 "Standing on the shoulders of some very clever giants!"