Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:124881
Feedback-ID: id5114917:Fastmail
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2024 07:53:56 +0100
To: internals@lists.php.net
Subject: =?US-ASCII?Q?Re=3A_=5BPHP-DEV=5D=5BDiscussion=5D_Should_All_S?=
 =?US-ASCII?Q?tring_Functions_Become_Multi-Byte_Safe=3F?=
User-Agent: K-9 Mail for Android
In-Reply-To: <8a60a5d76bf3bbdda821160c6141b45914a33b98.camel@ageofdream.com>
References: <8a60a5d76bf3bbdda821160c6141b45914a33b98.camel@ageofdream.com>
Message-ID: <47D63911-3C48-4514-9296-F1CAAC9597B9@rwec.co.uk>
Precedence: bulk
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
 charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
From: imsop.php@rwec.co.uk ("Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]")



On 11 August 2024 16:50:52 BST, Nick Lockheart <lists@ageofdream=2Ecom> wr=
ote:
>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=2E

The phrase "multibyte safe" may have made sense about 30 years ago, when i=
t was thought that a "universal character set" could just be a "wide ASCII"=
, encoding a straightforward list of characters, just more of them=2E=20

Modern Unicode is so much more than that, because the world's writing syst=
ems don't all work the same way=2E Should strlen() measure bytes, code poin=
ts, or graphemes? Should strtoupper() accept a locale, so it can handle cas=
es like Turkish "dotless i" where "I" is not the uppercase of "i"? And so o=
n, and so on=2E

I've seen plenty of languages boast that they are "Unicode aware" but few =
actually engaging with the question of what that actually means=2E Often th=
ey equate "character" with "code point" and stop there, which leads to resu=
lts that are just as useless to most of the world as if they'd equated it w=
ith "byte"=2E

Regards,
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]