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Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2005 15:43:41 +0200
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Subject: Proposal for Implementing Unicode in PHP
From: steven@acko.net (Steven Wittens)

Hi,

As a PHP user I'm sadly confronted daily with PHP's lack of proper 
Unicode support. PHP is rapidly falling behind the competition... as far 
as I know, Perl, Python, VBScript, Ruby all have good Unicode 
implementations. That PHP still doesn't have that after so many years 
sounds like there is a general lack of awareness about the issue from 
the core team and what to do about it.

I'm not a big shot C coder, but I do know a lot about encodings and 
Unicode, so I've outlined the big "Unicode and PHP" problem in an 
article, along with a proposal on how to tackle it:

http://www.acko.net/blog/unicode-in-php

It's a bit long, but then it's a complicated issue. I hope you guys find 
it informative or at least skim over the bold parts to see what is 
causing me and many others to tear my hair out in frustration and 
seriously consider alternatives.

Thanks,
Steven Wittens

PS: Sorry if this has to go to PHP-I18N instead, but that list seems to 
be aimed at practical I18N problems.. not fundamental changes in the 
core. Internals seemed more appropriate for this.