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Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2024 18:18:15 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV][Discussion] Should All String Functions Become
 Multi-Byte Safe?
To: Nick Lockheart <lists@ageofdream.com>, internals@lists.php.net
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From: tim@bastelstu.be (=?UTF-8?Q?Tim_D=C3=BCsterhus?=)

Hi

On 8/11/24 17:50, Nick Lockheart wrote:
> It seems like there's still a lot of string functions that assume that
> a character is a single byte, and these may actually work as expected
> when dealing with Latin characters, but may fail unexpectedly if a
> sequence is more than one byte.

PHP's strings are byte-strings containing arbitrary sequences of bytes. 
Unless you specifically select functions that interpret the byte-strings 
as something else, you get a byte-string interpretation. There is 
nothing unexpected about that.

> Are there any use cases for PHP where **single-byte** characters are
> the norm?

Dealing with binary formats.

> It seems that if everything on the Internet is multi-byte encoded now,
> then all of the PHP string functions should be multi-byte safe.

The premise is false. Everything on the Internet is byte-strings (also 
called "octet-string").

--------

You might be interested in https://externals.io/message/119149#119149.

Best regards
Tim Düsterhus