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Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 05:52:16 +0900
To: Al Baker <ajb732@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Status of Multibyte support in PHP
From: moriyoshi@at.wakwak.com (Moriyoshi Koizumi)

Hi,

On 2004/08/28, at 5:15, Al Baker wrote:
> I'm trying to find status on the multibyte support in PHP.  The manual
> shows the functions in mbstring to be experimental and it's hard to 
> find
> evidence of how stable it really is.

Which manual says that mbstring is still experimental? :) it was marked
"not experimental" two years ago.

No matter what that says, and no matter who says it's experimental,
it's been used for a fairly long time by lots of people and I've
never heard of a serious flaw / deficiency in its functionality.

There are also some alternatives that'd be worth paying attention to:

- PHP5 iconv extension
- php-i18n project led by l0t3k

 > Is this natively supported in PHP after 4.3.x?

While the extension is there, PHP doesn't yet natively supports 
multibyte
encodings in the sense that the language implementation always works 
singlebyte-wise
and doesn't automagicallytake care of these fancy characters.

Moriyoshi