Re: Deprecate or remove mbstring function overloads in PHP 7

"Nikita Popov" wrote in message news:CAF+90c9ZCE4rrdtwoqwnBE=u_s4aSXHU4N_Jia+40OY_gumjaA@mail.gmail.com...

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 11:11 PM, Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi! I was never happy about this particular hack but that said, unless we *know* it is not used widely (and I suspect it is in Japan etc. where we don't have a lot of visibility due to language barrier) we can't really remove it.

Also, I'm not sure why should we remove it. Yes, it's a PITA for the code, but looking at it in another direction, it is only a PITA if people actually turn it on, which means they're using it (otherwise why turn it on?). Deprecating it may be ok provided we actually have some proposal as to what people should do instead. If we have consensus on deprecating it, I don't think it's a problem have it done in 7.0 since it's not a substantial code/feature change and beta period provides ample time for people to scream if it's unacceptable. If there's no consensus yet, I'd go for 7.1.

From this thread, I'd say we have a consensus to deprecate it. From the Japanese side, both Yasuo and Masaki agree that this should be dropped and Masaki also linked a bug report where it is stated that the original author of this functionality agrees that this should be deprecated. It also contains a link to a discussion on a Japanese PHP dev ML, where, as far as Google Translate can tell me, everyone agreed that that we should do away with it. As to what people should use instead: For the quick hack to make things work: a sed script. Apart from that, implementing proper multibyte handling in applications. Nikita

But what is "proper" multibyte handling? Where is it documented? -- Tony Marston