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Date: Sat, 20 May 2023 17:56:21 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC [Discussion]: mb_str_pad
From: dossche.niels@gmail.com (Niels Dossche)

Hi Rowan

On 5/20/23 17:13, Rowan Tommins wrote:
> On 20 May 2023 13:53:20 BST, Niels Dossche <dossche.niels@gmail.com> wrote:
>> RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/mb_str_pad
> 
> Hi Niels,
> 
> This seems like a reasonable addition. My only hesitation is that it will share with other mbstring functions the slightly dubious definition of "character" as "code point", rather than "grapheme", when dealing with Unicode strings.
> 
> This is most easily demonstrated using combining diacritics, e.g. "Franc\u{0327}ais" is 9 code points long, but visually identical to the 8 code point "Fran\u{00E7}ais" used in your examples. Unicode defines "graphemes" or "grapheme clusters" to better match the common intuition of what a "character" means.
> 

Thanks for your insight.

This is a good point. I've added a clarification in the RFC text to make clear the definition of character is code point in this case, consistent with mbstring.

> Perhaps we should instead, or also, add a "grapheme_strpad" function to ext/intl?
> 
> Regards,
> 

I've added this suggestion to the future scope section.

Kind regards
Niels