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Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2022 18:55:31 +0000
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Subject: [RFC] Deprecate and Remove utf8_encode and utf8_decode
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

Good $daypart everybody,

I would like to open discussion on an RFC to deprecate and later remove 
the functions utf8_encode() and utf8_decode()

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_utf8_decode_and_utf8_encode

This is not a straight-forward decision, because these functions are not 
actually broken, and do have a narrow set of legitimate use cases - they 
convert between ISO 8859-1 (the single-byte encoding also known as 
"Latin 1") and UTF-8.

However, their naming and implementation leads to them so frequently 
being misused, that I believe their inclusion in the language does more 
harm than good. By deprecating and removing them, we can encourage users 
to specify their source and target encodings explicitly using one of 
several more flexible functions.

In previous discussions, alternatives have been proposed to improve 
these functions, but I am not convinced this is in the long-term 
interest of the language (see "Rejected Features" section in the RFC).

Note: one of the alternatives, UConverter::transcode, is currently 
undocumented; I have written a documentation patch to address this and 
other issues, regardless of the RFC's result: 
https://github.com/php/doc-en/pull/1418

Your feedback on the RFC, and the proposal itself, are welcome.

Regards,

-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]