Re: [RFC] Multibyte char handling

[Sorry I cant answer inline as there are many answers to give to many users] Like everybody, I' absolutely against adding an "encoding" parameter to ext/standard functions or relying on unreliable system locale. Like Nikita says, every multibyte function should go to ext/mbstring , and nowhere else, please , do not turn PHP into something even more dirty as it is nowadays :-p I'm +1 to embed and activate mbstring by default in future PHP releases. However, this has already been discussed (from what I remember) and I dont remember why we ended with a "no" end-word, could we be refreshed about this ? I'm not in favor of magic things. Magically replacing PHP strings by mb_ implementation is a really bad idea. We should keep the INI parameter about this alive though (mbstring.func_overload), so that people that explicitely want to activate such a magic can do it if they want to. I'm +1 also to start a "serious" (hum) discussion about multibyte/PHP6 , we've been saying this for years : we need native support of unicode in PHP :-p The actual problem we are facing once again shows this. Julien.P