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Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 13:25:41 +0400
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Subject: bitwise operations and Unicode strings
From: antony@zend.com (Antony Dovgal)

Hello.

Do you think the engine should support bitwise operators and Unicode strings?
If yes, how do you think it should work?

Example:
<?php
$a = "1"; 
$a|="2"; 
var_dump($a);
?>

This code outputs "3" in native mode and "Fatal error: Unsupported operand types" in Unicode mode.
I believe this is an inconsistency and it should be possible to use Unicode strings there.

There are several possible ways to implement it:
1) the same as with native strings - apply the operator to each element of the string separately;
2) convert the string to binary (using say iso-8859-1) and then see 1);

We can also leave it as is (since it doesn't seem very useful) or even drop the native strings support (it doesn't seem very useful to me either).
Opinions?

-- 
Wbr, 
Antony Dovgal