PHP Unicode support design document

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:45:27 +0200
"Ron Korving" r.korving@xit.nl wrote:

This looks very promising, I'm impressed by the work you guys have done (big
thumbs up).

There are a few issues/questions I have after reading your document:

"Therefore, command such as 'print' and 'echo' automatically convert their
arguments to the specified encoding. No automatic output encoding is
performed for anything else."

That's actually something I wanted to ask about too.

Do we really need such kind of magic?

I think it may be pretty confusing when after echo'ing or print'ing a variable
you can see one output, but after writing the very same variable into a file
you can see something completely different.

IMO it's similar to what we have with __toString() ATM.
Yes, it's documented, but it's still confusing that there is some magic
involved in one case and there is no magic in an other, almost similar case.

--
Wbr,
Antony Dovgal

"In order to create binary string literals, a new syntax is necessary:
prefixing a string literal with letter 'b' creates a binary string."

The b-prefix for binary strings is great, but how does that work with a
function like file_get_contents() or fread() ?
One can't do: $data = bfile_get_contents("somefile.bin");

fopen() and file_get_contents() already understands a context parameter,
specifying whethter you'd want to have binary or string/unicode data can
be done through that.

and the b syntax, only works for literal strings in your code:
b"foo", but b$foo is not going to work.

Derick

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

This looks very promising, I'm impressed by the work you guys have
done (big
thumbs up).

Thanks.

What about the other functions that output to stdout directly, such as
readfile() and passthru()?

readfile() uses streams so it would rely on stream filters and such.
passthru() should probably operate in binary mode.

Maybe it would be a nice feature to have an U_INVALID_EXCEPTION, so
that
users can actually catch the error and deal with it. Just an idea. Of
course
it's not usual for the PHP core and extensions to throw exceptions, but
perhaps this could change with PHP6.

I think the feature of raising exceptions vs. errors is orthogonal to
what the switch does. Consider that you may want the
skip/substitute/escape performed and then raise an error or not.

The b-prefix for binary strings is great, but how does that work with a
function like file_get_contents() or fread() ?
One can't do: $data = bfile_get_contents("somefile.bin");
And even if one could (somehow), wouldn't file_get_contents() already
unicode-encode all data it reads? How does such a function know if the
user
is expecting binary or textual data or does the encoding simply happen
after
the string is returned? In that case it's up to the user to use the
b-prefix, but then there's the syntax problem I mentioned.

'b' prefix is only for string literals. file_get_contents(), fread()
and other streams-based functions use the default stream semantics,
meaning that unless you change the default context, the data returned
by them will be of IS_BINARY type. The default context can contain a
filter that decodes the data from the specified encoding into Unicode.

-Andrei

It will be nice to have functions like this: isNumber(char),
isAlphabetic(char), isWhitespace(char) ...

It is on the plan or not?

its done already, just not committed yet...

clayton

""Ondrej Ivanic"" ondrej@kmit.sk wrote in message
news:4301A0D6.6000205@kmit.sk...

Andrei Zmievski wrote:

Ondrej Ivanic
(ondrej@kmit.sk)

For what it's worth, would \1 be interpreted as well in single quotes
(as it currently is in double quotes)?

No. Only \u and \U have meaning in single quotes (in addition to
current ones).

-Andrei