note 24747 deleted from function.utf8-decode by cmb

Note Submitter: ---- echo utf8_decode( "Ekonomi_ve_\xc4\xb0\xc5\x9f_D\xc3xbcnyas\xc4\xb1"); Outputs: Ekonomi_ve_??_Dünyas? This is not a bug. For example "\xc4\xb0" is decoded like this: 0xC4 = 110 00100 (110 prefix for 2 bytes) 0xB0 = 10 110000 (10 for trailing byte) Character = 001 0011 0000 = 0x130 This U+0130 Unicode character is not defined in ISO-8859-1 (where all codes are below 0x100), so the utf8_decode() function cannot represent it, and inserts a '?' replacement character in the result string... There's no alternative in the utf8_decode() function which returns a string made of single-byte characters. PHP really lacks a datatype for UTF-16 (a.k.a. Unicode) strings, unlike Java whose strings are always natively encoded with UTF-16... The alternative for PHP would be that it allows inserting SGML character entities. In the above example, it could return "İ" when decoding "\xc4\xb0". May be a future version of PHP could make strings using double-byte UTF-16 encoding, so that Unicode could be natively supported, but this would require adding new functions to define the behavior of I/O functions to provide external encode/decode capabilities when sending Unicode strings to a file stream, or with echo and print builtins for the standard input and output streams: - What would be the semantic of fwrite($fp, $string) if $string can contain any UTF-16 characters ? - Should fwrite() truncate the highest byte of each UTF-16 character, letting the user anticipating this truncation by performing the conversion to UTF-8 or character entities himself ? - Should the user be able to specify an encoder/decoder object used by all I/O operations performed on a file ? For example: - set_encoder($fp, 'utf8_encode') would define the PHP function to call to encode a string. - set_encoder($fp) or set_encoder($fp, null) would restore the default (stripping) encoder... - then fwrite($fp, $string) would return the number of bytes written to the stream, which may be larger than the length of $string...