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Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 21:14:31 +0200
Message-ID: <1211656471.11520.36.camel@goldfinger.johannes.nop>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Unicode progress [Was: unicode.semantics ad
	infinitum]
From: johannes@php.net (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

Hi,

On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 13:55 +0100, "Steph Fox" wrote:
> Warning: crc32() expects parameter 1 to be strictly a binary string, Unicode 
> string given in ...
> 
> Surely if a function's *expecting* a binary string it should do a silent 
> conversion, and only throw a warning if the conversion fails? I don't see 
> why the onus should always be on the user to adapt to this.

For some functions taking binary strings is critical for working nicely
with an automatic conversion in this case 
   crc32(u"äöü")
and
   crc32(b"äöü")
would give completely different results depending on the runtime
encoding, relying on a implicit conversion there is most likely a bug
(at least for apps written with PHP 6 in mind).

Oh and I might probably also argue that
   crc32(u"äöü")
should give the crc32 of the internal representation (utf-16...) of the
string, which is a total wtf for the user then.

The correct solution is to make safe use of the "S" modifier and not
using it too much.

As binary casts are allowed in modern PHP versions I don't see this as
an issue, while such a cast isn't absolutely the best thing to do: I'd
go with unicode_encode() to be sure about the encoding being used,
everything else is prone to fail some time (some code changing
unicode.runtime_encoding for some random reason...)

johannes