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Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 20:37:01 +0100
Organization: Zend Technologies
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Unicode progress [Was: unicode.semantics adinfinitum]
From: steph@zend.com ("Steph Fox")

Heya Johannes,

> 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,

Yes - but why should the user have to do the casting? Why can't the function 
itself cast to binary when it has an 'S' modifier? Like, during 
zend_parse_parameters() for example? Whatever happened to keeping PHP 
simple?

 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.

Nobody's asking to be able to cast it to unicode. I'm asking whether it's 
entirely necessary to force users to cast to binary all over the place, and 
a strict binary parameter spec looks like being one place where the cast 
could be done internally.

> 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...)

You're telling me an explicit cast to binary could fail internally but not 
externally? That doesn't make a lot of sense somehow.

- Steph