Upcoming PHP release will offer Unicode support (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Upcoming PHP release will offer Unicode support (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 2, 2007 11:15 UTC (Fri) by gimp (guest, #43821)
In reply to: Upcoming PHP release will offer Unicode support (Linux.com) by ajross
Parent article: Upcoming PHP release will offer Unicode support (Linux.com)

PHP has supported unicode and many other encodings for a long time thru the official extension php_mbstring.
Documentation of mbstring is here: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php

The big difference with PHP 6 as far as I understand, is that this extension is removed, and the features are moved into the core.

This means that all string functions within PHP will be unicode aware.
Existing scripts should work as before (unless they believe that 1 character = 1 byte in some situations).

This is good for various reasons, for example if you now develop a PHP 6-compatible application, you know that the host will support these encodings, without any special configuration needed.

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