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What factors make PHP Unicode-incompatible?

Asked 2009-02-20T23:48:56.253
42

I am able use UTF-8 characters just fine in my scripts.

As a matter of fact it is possible to have names of variables and functions contain Unicode characters.

There is also the mb_string extension which deals with multi-byte strings, yet in countless articles PHP is criticized for its lack of Unicode support.

I don't get it; why is PHP said to not support Unicode?

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2 Answers

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Many of the common extensions do not have unicode support or (even worse) you "need to know" that a string contains unicode/utf-8 sequences, like for example XMLReader. And it can make quite a difference wether PHP's glob() calls FindFirstFileA or FindFirstFileW on win32.
Another (much smaller but surprisingly often being the source of annoyance) issue are BOMs which PHP do not recognize.

answered 2009-02-21T00:25:55.273
2

What is meant by 'support' is 'native support'. Take a look at this to get detailed information.

answered 2009-02-21T00:06:29.267

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