Re: [PEPr] Comment on Networking::Net_IDNA

Johannes Schlueter wrote:

Matthias Sommerfeld wrote:

1) The package name IDNA may be Net related, but doesn't it be more related to Internatiolization at all? I18N_IDN may be a good choice here.

I disagree, since IDN(A) is just intended for domain names, not for general internationalisation or localisation purposes. So I think it is really placed best in the Net_ category.

My idn PECL extension is listed under I18N, too. http://pecl.php.net/idn

2) Punycode Punycode is a single standard. Even if it's only related to IDNA it should (IMHO) go into a single class.

Punycode is just one part of encoding / decoding IDNs. The whole story of StringPrep / NamePrep is part of it. So dividing the whole process of an IDN codec into the basic parts of Punycode conversion, Nameprep and so on doesn't make sense to me.

Conversion of whole domain names is the thing most people want to do with such a class so imho it's nice to have other possibilities but not required. The idn extension currently has only two functions, either convert a Unicode-string holding a domain name to IDN-Ascii or the other way round. Somwhen I'll go and offer the TLD-checking with the extension (some TLDs allow only limited parts of the Unicode set) which is offered by the GNU libidn I'm using and if someone asks I'll export the other functions for stringprep or Punycode but I don't see them with high priority

3) Input encodings I'd like to see support for many more input encodings than just the unicode-compatible ones. Especially "Multibyte string" (mbstring) ind "libiconv" (iconv) extension are interesting here. Also "recode" may need a quick look on.

I disagree. This should be part of the application using Net_IDNA. I also tend to remove the routines of snipping the input string into the domain name parts, protocol and query string again, since this approach seems to be to much overhead in the sense of IDN. IDN is specified for second level domains only, so extracting the second level domain from a complete link in the face of the fact, that there's various Unicode codepoints representing a dot is ugly and prone to fail. But this last comment is also open for discussion :)

imho splitting the a URL into hostname, URI, etc. can easily be done with parse_url() so this has not to be part of the class.

Besides the things pointed out above I consider the class being quite stable and complete.

Maybe we could look over it to create some similar API for ext_idn and PEAR_idn so a user can easily select wether he can use a C written extension or if he has to use the PHP version but don't need to change too

much of his code. johannes

I don't know whether it's hard to add PHP-builtin classes to your extension - is it? So an OO-interface would be great here, while leaving the procedural functions of the extension untouched for those who don't want to care about or even don't know about the PEAR Foo_IDNA. This would not need any changes to Foo_IDNA beside cosmetic considerations. -- regards, david rech