Re: How should PEAR packages support multiple character sets?

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 3:37 PM, Christian Schmidt <lists@chsc.dk> wrote: > Jan Schneider wrote: > > I don't. It really depends on the package. For some packages it simply > > makes sense to assume utf-8 encoding, especially packages dealing with > > dom and xml, but probably also others. > In your opinion, what kind of package that deals with non-US-ASCII > characters should use a character set other than UTF-8? > > > > This has to be documented of course. > I agree. Asssumptions like this should be documented properly. Perhaps > it should even be a requirement that the expected encoding is mentioned > in all @param and @return tags that refer to strings. This would also > make the information available in the tooltip in IDEs. > > > > But it doesn't make sense to force passing a charset to those > > package that work in a certain context where utf-8 is basically the > > standard. > I disagree. If your code generally assumes that strings are ISO-8859-1, > it would be convenient if the DOM extension would all all strings to be > ISO-8859-1 rather than UTF-8. Also, I think it is rather subjective > which character sets are considered standard in a given context. Subjective? Maybe, but hey, I could argue that the standard is ISO-8859-15 (Euro symbol, anyone? ;-)) but isn't UTF-8 a standard already? I mean most email clients send UTF-8 today, most websites are UTF-8 (all browsers support it), most APIs expect it as well. Non-UTF-8 charsets are really a pain to deal with. So why not just use this standard and document it like - "you will need to pass UTF-8 in". Or for example you use mb's functions to detect charsets and convert them to UTF-8 on the fly. Though I think that's too expensive and people should just pass it in already and convert it themselves if they don't already have UTF-8. Till