Re: Unicode progress [Was: unicode.semantics adinfinitum]

Steph, On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 20:37 +0100, Steph Fox wrote: > Heya Johannes, > > > For some functions taking binary strings is critical for working nicely > > with an automatic conversion in this case > > crc32(u"äöü") > > and > > crc32(b"äöü") > > would give completely different results depending on the runtime > > encoding, > > Yes - but why should the user have to do the casting? Why can't the function > itself cast to binary when it has an 'S' modifier? Like, during > zend_parse_parameters() for example? Whatever happened to keeping PHP > simple? Since only the users knows the correct encoding. The function might fallback to unicode.runtime_encoding which can be wrong. And it's hard to track the reason. > relying on a implicit conversion there is most likely a bug > > (at least for apps written with PHP 6 in mind). > > > > Oh and I might probably also argue that > > crc32(u"äöü") > > should give the crc32 of the internal representation (utf-16...) of the > > string, which is a total wtf for the user then. > > Nobody's asking to be able to cast it to unicode. I'm asking whether it's > entirely necessary to force users to cast to binary all over the place, and > a strict binary parameter spec looks like being one place where the cast > could be done internally. In this case there's no cast but the most simple implementation of crc32() on a unicode string. > > The correct solution is to make safe use of the "S" modifier and not > > using it too much. > > > > As binary casts are allowed in modern PHP versions I don't see this as > > an issue, while such a cast isn't absolutely the best thing to do: I'd > > go with unicode_encode() to be sure about the encoding being used, > > everything else is prone to fail some time (some code changing > > unicode.runtime_encoding for some random reason...) > > You're telling me an explicit cast to binary could fail internally but not > externally? That doesn't make a lot of sense somehow. Externally the user is responsible to select the proper encoding internally PHP has to guess. johannes