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Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 09:15:35 +0600
Reply-To: Dagdamor <dagdamor@simps.ru>
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Subject: 5.2.5 - changes in the string parser
From: dagdamor@simps.ru (Dagdamor)

Hello.

I am reporting about the changes that were made in the string parser in 5.2.5.
From this version, sequences "\f" and "\v" are special and are parsed as FF
and VT symbols. IMHO that doesn't make sense because the behavior was
different in the older versions of PHP, and will affect many existing scripts.
Those two symbols are also very rarely used and I don't think this feature
will be very useful for the developers.

I checked the documentation. It says that only "\n", "\r" and "\t" sequences
(I count only alphanumeric ones) are special, there is nothing about \f or \v.
The documentation clearly says that all other sequences are not special and
the backslash becomes part of the string. It also says: "usually, there is no
need to escape the backslash itself", in other words, escaping the backslash
only when necessary is allowed and encouraged.

I ask for rolling that change back because it's a serious BC break.

Regards,
Serge