Rasmus, Gunnar, When Rasmus says "manipulate", it means to me "modify". Perhaps that is not Rasmus' meaning.
However, you may need to be aware of the encoding if you are testing, comparing, searching values, etc. as well. For example a case-insensitive search would need to be aware of the encoding to use the right values for upper and lower case. More generally you should be aware of the encoding, label it properly, and potentially convert encodings appropriately to/from processes or I/O that may require another encoding. My answer to Gunnar's question is that UTF-8 is a perfectly valid form of Unicode (UTF-16, UTF-32 being others) and you don't need to favor utf-16. PHP 5.3 has more functions for internationalization that are utf-8 and locale based. You might look into those. tex -----Original Message----- From: Rasmus Lerdorf [mailto:ras...@lerdorf.com] Sent: Saturday, October 03, 2009 9:59 AM To: Gunnar Vestergaard Cc: php-i18n@lists.php.net Subject: Re: [PHP-I18N] PHP support of Unicode? Gunnar Vestergaard wrote: > When using PHP, writing content in my local language and my neighbouring > contries' language, ISO 8859-1 has been sufficient as a character > encoding. But using PHP with other languages, is that possible? I mean, > does PHP support Unicode at present time? As I understand it, the > following statement is true: > "PHP supports Unicode only as long as it is encoded as UTF-8" > > Is that correct, or does PHP also support UTF-16? It depends what you are doing. PCRE, our regex library, only speaks UTF-8 and there are functions like json_encode() that assume utf-8 as well. If you are just doing pass-through stuff, you can use whatever you want. It is only if you want to manipulate the text in some manner that you need to worry about the encoding. -Rasmus -- PHP Unicode & I18N Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php -- PHP Unicode & I18N Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
