Status of Multibyte support in PHP

20 years ago by Al Baker — view source

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Hi,

I'm trying to find status on the multibyte support in PHP. The manual
shows the functions in mbstring to be experimental and it's hard to find
evidence of how stable it really is.

Is this natively supported in PHP after 4.3.x?

Thanks,
Al

20 years ago by Moriyoshi Koizumi — view source

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Hi,

I'm trying to find status on the multibyte support in PHP. The manual
shows the functions in mbstring to be experimental and it's hard to
find
evidence of how stable it really is.

Which manual says that mbstring is still experimental? :) it was marked
"not experimental" two years ago.

No matter what that says, and no matter who says it's experimental,
it's been used for a fairly long time by lots of people and I've
never heard of a serious flaw / deficiency in its functionality.

There are also some alternatives that'd be worth paying attention to:

PHP5 iconv extension
php-i18n project led by l0t3k

Is this natively supported in PHP after 4.3.x?

While the extension is there, PHP doesn't yet natively supports
multibyte
encodings in the sense that the language implementation always works
singlebyte-wise
and doesn't automagicallytake care of these fancy characters.

Moriyoshi

20 years ago by Al Baker — view source

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Thanks for the confirmation. The experimental warning appears on any of
the individual help files for mbstring (e.g. mb_ereg).

Do you know if the regular expression support lets you match alpha and
numeric content like you would normally?

Hi,

I'm trying to find status on the multibyte support in PHP. The manual
shows the functions in mbstring to be experimental and it's hard to
find
evidence of how stable it really is.

Which manual says that mbstring is still experimental? :) it was marked
"not experimental" two years ago.

No matter what that says, and no matter who says it's experimental,
it's been used for a fairly long time by lots of people and I've
never heard of a serious flaw / deficiency in its functionality.

There are also some alternatives that'd be worth paying attention to:

PHP5 iconv extension

php-i18n project led by l0t3k

Is this natively supported in PHP after 4.3.x?

While the extension is there, PHP doesn't yet natively supports
multibyte
encodings in the sense that the language implementation always works
singlebyte-wise
and doesn't automagicallytake care of these fancy characters.

Moriyoshi

20 years ago by Sean Coates — view source

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Are these functions in fact non-experimental? If so, I will remove the
warning from the mb_* functions in the manual.

Al Baker wrote:

Thanks for the confirmation. The experimental warning appears on any of
the individual help files for mbstring (e.g. mb_ereg).

Which manual says that mbstring is still experimental? :) it was marked
"not experimental" two years ago.

No matter what that says, and no matter who says it's experimental,
it's been used for a fairly long time by lots of people and I've
never heard of a serious flaw / deficiency in its functionality.

20 years ago by Moriyoshi Koizumi — view source

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Are these functions in fact non-experimental? If so, I will remove the
warning from the mb_* functions in the manual.

Yep, definitely. Thanks in advance :)

Moriyoshi

20 years ago by Moriyoshi Koizumi — view source

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Hi,

Thanks for the confirmation. The experimental warning appears on any
of
the individual help files for mbstring (e.g. mb_ereg).

Hmm, warnings seem to persist in manual pages of the multibyte regular
expression functions. I'll remove them later :)

Do you know if the regular expression support lets you match alpha and
numeric content like you would normally?

Maybe sorts of character classes don't work as you expect, because
they lack comprehensive collation support that fully conforms to the
Unicode
specification. It's stable I think, but actually not complete yet.

Al

Moriyoshi

20 years ago by Rasmus Lerdorf — view source

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Maybe sorts of character classes don't work as you expect, because
they lack comprehensive collation support that fully conforms to the
Unicode
specification. It's stable I think, but actually not complete yet.

ICU has gotten a lot more modular these days, so it may be possible to
pick out smaller pieces of it to address things like this. Last time we
looked at it some 4+ years ago, it was a huge all-or-nothing beast. There
was also an icu extension proposed on pecl-dev recently.

-Rasmus

20 years ago by Derick Rethans — view source

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Thanks for the confirmation. The experimental warning appears on any of
the individual help files for mbstring (e.g. mb_ereg).

Can you file a "Documentation" problem for that on bugs.php.net please?

regards,
Derick

--
Derick Rethans
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org

20 years ago by Dave Barr — view source

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Derick Rethans wrote:

Thanks for the confirmation. The experimental warning appears on any of
the individual help files for mbstring (e.g. mb_ereg).

Can you file a "Documentation" problem for that on bugs.php.net please?

Don't bother, I have fixed this in the documentation.

regards,
Derick

Dave

20 years ago by Al Baker — view source

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So, all the mb_* functions will have the experimental removed? I see a
few that still have it, or is that just the mirrors not up to date yet?

Derick Rethans wrote:

Thanks for the confirmation. The experimental warning appears on any of
the individual help files for mbstring (e.g. mb_ereg).

Can you file a "Documentation" problem for that on bugs.php.net please?

Don't bother, I have fixed this in the documentation.

regards,
Derick

Dave

20 years ago by Mehdi Achour — view source

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The warning will be gone after the next build of the manual.

Mehdi

Al Baker wrote:

So, all the mb_* functions will have the experimental removed? I see a
few that still have it, or is that just the mirrors not up to date yet?

Al

Derick Rethans wrote:

Thanks for the confirmation. The experimental warning appears on any of
the individual help files for mbstring (e.g. mb_ereg).

Can you file a "Documentation" problem for that on bugs.php.net please?

Don't bother, I have fixed this in the documentation.

regards,
Derick

Dave

20 years ago by Derick Rethans — view source

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So, all the mb_* functions will have the experimental removed? I see a
few that still have it, or is that just the mirrors not up to date yet?

I'd go for the iconv() functions as you need to external extension for
this in PHP 5 (it's enabled by default).

Derick

--
Derick Rethans
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org

20 years ago by Adam Q — view source

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Actually I noticed that the Zend Engine 2 page [1] mentions
"Internationalization" as a new feature of PHP 5...
Has there been big changes to the way PHP5 handles i18n?

[1] http://www.zend.com/zend/zend-engine-summary.php

Thanks,
Adam

So, all the mb_* functions will have the experimental removed? I see
a
few that still have it, or is that just the mirrors not up to date
yet?

I'd go for the iconv() functions as you need to external extension for
this in PHP 5 (it's enabled by default).

Derick

--
Derick Rethans
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org

20 years ago by Derick Rethans — view source

unread

Actually I noticed that the Zend Engine 2 page [1] mentions
"Internationalization" as a new feature of PHP 5...
Has there been big changes to the way PHP5 handles i18n?

[1] http://www.zend.com/zend/zend-engine-summary.php

That paragraph is utter bollocks if you ask me.

Derick

--
Derick Rethans
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org

20 years ago by Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg — view source

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Actually I noticed that the Zend Engine 2 page [1] mentions
"Internationalization" as a new feature of PHP 5...
Has there been big changes to the way PHP5 handles i18n?

[1] http://www.zend.com/zend/zend-engine-summary.php

That paragraph is utter bollocks if you ask me.

This looks like a really old document. It still lists the
possibility of MI in PHP 5.

Neither MI or i18n has been added to ZE 2, and there haven't been
talks about them in months, if not years. :)

-adam

--
adam@trachtenberg.com
author of o'reilly's "upgrading to php 5" and "php cookbook"
avoid the holiday rush, buy your copies today!