Thoughts on UTF-8 (was Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Ampersand)

[Carsten K. <car...@us...>]

Using UTF-8 would be the ideal solution.

PostgreSQL support for UTF-8 worked well last time I tried it. Only 
MySQL newer than 4.1.x (Alpha) has UTF-8 but I think most people still 
use 3.23 including myself.

I just read about some new improvements to PHP. Apparently as of PHP 
4.3.0, the option --enable-mbstring is the default which means mbstring 
functions should be present unless PHP is explicitly compiled otherwise.

The good news here is that various PHP string/regex functions (if I 
read this correctly) can be automatically overloaded with multi-byte 
string functions:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php

> Multibyte extension (mbstring) also supports 'function overloading' to 
> add multibyte string functionality without code modification. Using 
> function overloading, some PHP string functions will be oveloaded 
> multibyte string functions. For example, mb_substr() is called instead 
> of substr() if function overloading is enabled. Function overload 
> makes easy to port application supporting only single-byte encoding 
> for multibyte application. mbstring.func_overload in php.ini should be 
> set some positive value to use function overloading.

Carsten


On Friday, February 21, 2003, at 04:09  pm, Jeff Dairiki wrote:

> The real solution to that is to switch to using UTF-8 internally,
> so that we can store all those nice characters in a uniform manner.
> The problem is that MySQL and PHP support for this is not
> (last I checked) good (or universal) enough to do this.