Good $daypart everybody,
I would like to open discussion on an RFC to deprecate and later remove
the functions utf8_encode() and utf8_decode()
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_utf8_decode_and_utf8_encode
This is not a straight-forward decision, because these functions are not
actually broken, and do have a narrow set of legitimate use cases - they
convert between ISO 8859-1 (the single-byte encoding also known as
"Latin 1") and UTF-8.
However, their naming and implementation leads to them so frequently
being misused, that I believe their inclusion in the language does more
harm than good. By deprecating and removing them, we can encourage users
to specify their source and target encodings explicitly using one of
several more flexible functions.
In previous discussions, alternatives have been proposed to improve
these functions, but I am not convinced this is in the long-term
interest of the language (see "Rejected Features" section in the RFC).
Note: one of the alternatives, UConverter::transcode, is currently
undocumented; I have written a documentation patch to address this and
other issues, regardless of the RFC's result:
https://github.com/php/doc-en/pull/1418
Your feedback on the RFC, and the proposal itself, are welcome.
Regards,
--
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]
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