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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] What is the use of "unicode.semantics" in PHP 6?
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

> In PHP4/5 \xC4 and \x85 are not characters. They are bytes.

They are both. In PHP 5, character and byte is the same. In Unicode, 
it's not.

> I can't pay such price. You are reducing available coding options and want

Then you can't use Unicode, at least not directly - you would have to 
convert all your unicode data back to bytes and work with them on that 
level. Unicode works on character level, you want to work on byte level, 
so somewhere on the way translation should happen. We will try to make 
it easier, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect that code based 
on this assumption would work without any changes whatsoever in php 6.

> If I take a look at ext/unicode/unicode.c, I see more PHP_FUNCTION
> functions. I don't know PHP6 release schedule. If PHP6 is approaching RC

ext/unicode as it is now is very incomplete. It will be improved quite 
soon. I don't want to announce things prematurely, but please just have 
a little patience and you'll see the improvement.

> stage, maybe docs can be updated to inform about these functions. PHP
> provides API for PHP scripts developers. Strongest API part is good
> documentation. I shouldn't have to dig through C sources in order to learn
> about available interpreter features. If you write code now and document
> it later, you won't document it or it will take some time and lots of bug
> reports to sync sources with manual.

Nobody expects you to dig through C sources, and of course documentation 
is important. However the basic assumption of Unicode that characters 
and bytes are not the same is something that I wouln't expect to change. 
Of course, having docs that describe common unicode pitfalls and how to 
work around them is very important too. I think once we are closer to 
releasing it would become higher priority.
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com   http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829   MSN: stas@zend.com