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Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 17:19:32 -0500 (CDT)
To: "PHPdev" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [php6] accepting an ascii string only
From: ceo@l-i-e.com ("Richard Lynch")

On Mon, May 15, 2006 4:19 pm, Andrei Zmievski wrote:
> That assumes there are a hundred places where you want to receive an
> ASCII string. Are they really that prevalent?

How many of the extension libraries are Unicode-ready?

You see an awful lot of users with quasi-Unicode data that gets into
their database from un-scrubbed (or minimally-scrubbed) form data, and
then they just blindly pass it off to the extension library.

This usually results in "bug reports" of "weird characters" or cries
for help in PHP-General -- And one look at User Contributed comments
on http://php.net/str_replace will tell you that your average PHP
Developer has NO CLUE about Unicode, and, to be honest, doesn't really
care that much.

They're writing a boutique site for a client who doesn't have any
aspirations to a World Market, despite being "on" the World Wide Web.

So when all these internal strings change overnight into Unicode and
the mutli-byte data is blindly shoved out to tidy, libpdf, mysql,
postgresql, GD, imagemagick, shell scripts, and no less than four (4)
different XML parsing libraries over the years, you tell me:

What's gonna happen?

Is it going to magically "fix" all those weird-looking characters
because PHP is shoving a Unicode string out to the extension library
and all the extension libraries are ready for Unicode?

Is it going to "just work" albeit with funky-looking characters just
like before because the extension libraries aren't ready for Unicode
yet, just like they aren't thread-safe so Apache 2 is kinda pointless?

Or is it going to blow up in their faces because PHP is suddenly
assuming that all these extension libraries can cope with Unicode
strings?

Personally, I'm terrified as a PHP Developer by the Unicode change.  I
*know* I don't have the skillset to handle Unicode issues.

If you guys don't make it "just work" -- I'm screwed, along with HUGE
segments of your install-base.

How hard do you really want to make it for extensions to be written to
deal with Unicode strings if they're not Unicode-ready?

I have NO IDEA what the answers to these questions are.  But I sure
hope you guys do... :-)

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