Hi list, I'm currently in the process of migrating an old application from php 5.6 to 7.2. In the process, I fiddled with the default_charset ini setting.
The documentation states (c.f. https://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.default-charset): "In PHP 5.6 onwards, "UTF-8" is the default value and [...] The value of default_charset will also be used to set the default character set for [...] and for mbstring functions if the mbstring.http_input mbstring.http_output mbstring.internal_encoding configuration option is unset." As such, I'd expect to be able to set default_charset to iso-8859-1 and mbstring to pick that same setting for its internal encoding (if the mentioned directives are unset, that is). This seems not to be the case: <?php ini_set( 'default_charset', 'iso-8859-1' ); var_dump( ini_get("mbstring.internal_encoding") ); var_dump( ini_get("mbstring.http_input") ); var_dump( ini_get("mbstring.http_output") ); echo mb_internal_encoding() . "\n"; echo mb_strlen( "\xc3\xb6" ) . "\n"; echo mb_strlen( "\xc3\xb6", '8bit' ) . "\n"; This outputs (7.2.15 on a CentOS box): string(0) "" string(0) "" string(0) "" UTF-8 1 2 The default_charset is set but mbstring settings are not, so I'd expect to get 2 as the character/byte count in both cases. If I throw a mb_internal_encoding("iso-8859-1") in the mix, both string lengths are equal. Since the mentioned mbstring directives are deprecated as of 5.6.0 - do I really need to use mb_internal_encoding() instead? Is the documentation wrong or am I just misinterpreting it? I thought that default_charset should act as some kind of "master setting" in order not to have to set all specific settings as well (e.g. iconv, mbstring). Usually we use UTF-8, so I did not come across this before... Any insight? Greetings Nico
