note 72979 added to function.mb-strlen

Thank you Peter Albertsson for presenting that! After spending more than eight hours tracking down two specific bugs in my mbstring-func_overloaded environment I have learned a very important lesson: Many developers rely on strlen to give the amount of bytes in a string. While mb-overloading has very many advantages, the most hard-spotted pitfall must be this issue. Two examples (from the two bugs found earlier): 1. Writing a string to a file: <?php $str = "string with utf-8 chars åèä - doo-bee doo-bee dooh"; $fp = fopen($this->_file, "wb"); if ($fp) { $len = strlen($str); fwrite($fp, $str, $len); } ?> PS This is found i the PEAR::Cache_Lite package (Lite.php) - Reported 2. Iterating through a string's characters: <?php $str = "string with utf-8 chars åèö - doo-bee doo-bee dooh"; $newStr = ""; for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($str); $i++) { $newStr .= $str[$i]; } ?> Both of these situations will fail to save / store the last characters in $str. This can be very hard to spot and can be especially fatal for say serialized strings, xml etc. So, try to avoid these situations to support overloaded environments, and remeber Peter Albertssons remark if you find problems under such an environment. ---- Server IP: 84.47.204.3 Probable Submitter: 213.114.132.137 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mb-strlen.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/72979 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/72979/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/72979/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/72979/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/72979/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/72979/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/72979/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/72979 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/72979 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php