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Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2022 23:54:46 +0000
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To: Rowan Tommins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Deprecate and Remove utf8_encode and utf8_decode
From: craig@craigfrancis.co.uk (Craig Francis)

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On Sun, 20 Feb 2022 at 23:12, Rowan Tommins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't have hard facts to back it up, but my impression is that
> ext/mbstring is quite commonly installed, and required by apps and
> libraries. Unlike the other two, it has no system dependencies, because
> the implementation is entirely in PHP's source tree.
>


Thanks for confirming those details Rowan.

I'm just wondering, and this would not be necessary... considering how most
systems need to deal with UTF-8 data today, could an argument be made for
enabling etc/mbstring by default?

I'm fairly sure Ubuntu and CentOS need to install the package
`php-mbstring` separately; whereas my limited experience with cheep/shared
hosting, they tend to have it enabled.

Then `mb_convert_encoding()` could become the default suggested
alternative, and everyone could trust functions like `mb_strlen()` are
available as well.

Just for my own interest - technically mbstring uses libmbfl, but that's
already available from /ext/mbstring/libmbfl/

Craig

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