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Subject: Where are we ACTUALLY on Unicode?
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

 From Andrei Zmievski last year ....
> "In PHP 6, everything by default will be Unicode," such as default string types, said PHP core developer Andrei Zmievski during a keynote presentation at the 2009 Zend/PHP conference in San Jose, Calif.  The PHP 6 platform also will feature the ability to use Unicode characters for identifiers.

I must say that I was still under the impression that USING Unicode in PHP5 was 
not possible? I know that with care some language related constructs can be 
used, but thought that these are not readily transferred between installations? 
I presume that the 'examples' of internationalization actually only work because 
PHP5 see them as a strange ascii string? Rather than a true unicode string? And 
if you see them as 'unicode' it is because 'your email client can handle them' 
rather than because PHP5 is?

 From my own view point, as I have said, using strange names for identifiers 
will probably not happen, but I am now using using Unicode to store customer 
names and other data which in the past have been messed up when 'code pages' 
were being used. I can nowadays simply cut and past those details from paypal or 
wherever and use them, but if I access that data directly from PHP5 things 
become a little hit or miss. Quite often content gets corrupted because it has 
not been 'unmangeled and remangled' when the database just handles it transparently.

What I am probably asking is what was the brick wall PHP6 hit. I was under the 
impression that there was no agreement on 'switchable or only' to unicode core? 
( And those who did write PHP6 books seemed to have their own views on which way 
the discussions would go ;) ).

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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