About a year and a half ago I developed code to enable PHP3 to support Unicode using ICU. These was some initial interest but it died fast so I did not look into what it would take to develop a PHP4 solution. The original problem was adding UTF-16 (UCS-2) support to PHP. In the mean time I have perfected the ICU interface code and have recently made it available as open source code.
It is thread safe cross-platform and not only supports all forms of Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16 & UTF-32) but it supports code page data with the same code. It is great for browsers because it can use the same functions to process code page and Unicode data dynamically so that the code does not change if you are using UTF-8 for one browser and EUC-JP for another. It has new functions to make PHP charset handling easier. No there is no need to add 16 bit data types to PHP. I added the Unicode support to PHP3 but making it a semi-resident module. It also required some minor changes to the HTTP header processing. With the new xIUA code the changes to PHP are far less. It also make PHP thread safe in that each thread can have different locales. This is something that setlocale does not provide. Carl -- PHP Internationalization Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
