Unicode Support for PHP5

[Roberto]

When will PHP get Unicode support for PHP5? I realize that English is
what everyone speaks when they want to do business, but I potentially
could be not getting clients for my freelancing work simply because I
program in PHP and PHP doesn't support their character set. This
problem has been known for awhile now, mentioned in lots of forums and
recently gotten major exposure from the popular Joel On Software blog.
Yet I see that the Unicode module isn't ready yet even after two
year's effort on it.

[Michael Fesser]

..oO(Roberto)

>When will PHP get Unicode support for PHP5?

Native Unicode support will come with PHP 6.

>I realize that English is
what everyone speaks when they want to do business, but I potentially
could be not getting clients for my freelancing work simply because I
program in PHP and PHP doesn't support their character set. This
problem has been known for awhile now, mentioned in lots of forums and
recently gotten major exposure from the popular Joel On Software blog.

What exactly is your problem? I already use Unicode (UTF-8) for quite a
while without any trouble. You just have to know the limitations in PHP
5 and how to work around them. Some more details might help.

Micha

[Toby A Inkster]

Roberto wrote:

When will PHP get Unicode support for PHP5?

Full Unicode support is due in PHP 6. Developer previews are already
available, and Unicode support on them is mostly pretty good.

But even in PHP 5 (and 4), Unicode output is mostly usable. You just have
to remember that the built-in string functions are not Unicode-aware, and
treat text as strings of octets instead of multi-byte characters. So for
example:

PHP 5: echo strlen('ビ'); // prints "3"
PHP 6: echo strlen('ビ'); // prints "1"

PHP 5 is usable for non-ASCII character sets -- it just means you have to
think about string functions a little more carefully. The mbstring module
<http://www.php.net/mbstringis a great help too.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 11:20.]

The Semantic Web
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/03/09/sw/