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

[Aredridel <are...@nb...>]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 11:40:25PM -0500, Carsten Klapp wrote:
> 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:

The standard posix functions are, but pcre UTF-8 is still really
dubious.  I've enabled it in the wiki I'm maintaining, which is fully
UTF-8, and it doesn't work perfectly yet.

All in all, UTF-8 is the best internal encoding -- most search
algorithms don't have to be modified, and false-positives with a non-UTF
aware search are very infrequent. Any database that can handle ISO8859-1
can handle UTF-8 for storage, so that's not really an issue.  Browsers
don't always send UTF-8 /back/ when you request it, that's one major
issue.  You do have to validate form submission.

Ari