Re: What "Unicode support" really means

On 9 Mar 2014, at 20:27, Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk> wrote: > So the road path for PHP6 should be that the bulk of variable/function names will only ever use > ASCII-7 characters? Stopping those holes that currently allow some unicode strings to push through > there currently? If the core code base is not going to support unicode - and I include unicode > variables automatically created from XML and database data - then so be it. In which case there is > nothing to fix as we just stick with mbstring to handle the data content of variables? I think we should move to only using the traditional ASCII-7 subset for all identifier names. It should be case-sensitive for everything, too. That said, mbstring is not a good solution for handling variable content. PHP needs to have proper Unicode support that doesn’t cause confusion and that allows people to write modern web apps that can handle Unicode text properly, without too much difficulty. At present we have a standard library of string functions which don’t necessarily work correctly with Unicode text. This has to change. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/