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Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2012 21:54:35 +0200
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Subject: mbstring, a proposition of additional functions
From: ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net ("Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa")

Hello,

ext/mbstring is very useful, but from my point of view, some functions=20
are missing.
I would like to propose the addition of the following functions.

mb_append($str, $piece) and mb_prepend($str, $piece):
To add a $piece to, respectively, the end and the start of $string. It=20
should consider the text direction, e.g. if $str is Right-to-Left,=20
mb_append() will add $piece to the end, so the left, of $string.

concat($str, $piece):
If mb_append() and mb_prepend() are too hard to understand by users,=20
concat() would be pretty much simpler and will act in the same way.

mb_pad($length, $piece, $end):
Pretty much like strpad but with multi-bytes considering.
Note that, like mb_append and mb_prepend, we do not speak about left and =

right, but start and end.

mb_get_direction($str):
Return LTR or RTL. For one char, it is =93easy=94. For a string, it is mo=
re=20
complex because we can have embedding directions (a string with many=20
directions).

mb_get_char($code) or mb_chr($code):
Get Unicode character from a code-point/decimal value representation.

mb_get_code($char) or mb_ord($char):
Get code-point/decimal value representation from of Unicode character.

Finally, it would be great if mb_substr() could consider text direction=20
(or create a new dedicated function?). For example, mb_substr($str, 0,=20
1) will return the first char from the start (and not the left as it is=20
implemented now).

I think it could help developers to create nice libraries without=20
requiring a lot of skills in Unicode.
Thoughts?

Best regards :-).

--=20
Ivan Enderlin
Developer of Hoa
http://hoa.42/ or http://hoa-project.net/

PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis)
http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/

Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C
http://w3.org/