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Message-ID: <4B581FD5.6090300@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:35:17 +0000
Reply-To: nrixham@gmail.com
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To: Tim Starling <tstarling@wikimedia.org>
CC: Stan Vassilev <sv_forums@fmethod.com>, internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Dots and spaces in variable names are converted to
 underscores.
From: nrixham@gmail.com (Nathan Rixham)

Tim Starling wrote:
> Stan Vassilev wrote:
>> I hope PHP6 will remove this processing as register_globals will be
>> completely removed at that point.
> 
> I'd be happy if it stayed like it is, for backwards compatibility. 

Sometimes forwards compatibility has to take precedence though.

Linked data is set to explode around the net over the next year or two;
general form fields will soon be replaced with properties from
ontologies (such as foaf), people will have personal rdf graphs housed
in their browsers and autocomplete will populate forms where the
property uri's are known;  if these form elements all contain uri's with
dots swapped out with underscores then this could be a potentially big
problem for the giant global graph and PHP developers specifically.

All solved very easily by being able to ini switch this replacement
feature on and off.

on the server side..
http://example.org/ontology/0.1/some_property
becomes
http://example.org/ontology/0_1/some_property

how do you reverse replace the correct underscore with a dot?

if we use the <input
name="data[http://example.org/ontology/0.1/some_property]" /> workaround
in userland this is no doubt breaking many future browser extensions
looking for <input name="http://example.org/ontology/0.1/some_property" />

quite sure a small patch and ini switch would cater for both BC and FC
in this case; even if it was removed all together then to achieve bc
would be a simple for loop and str_replace; hardly major.

regards!