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Comment by dougaitken | Hacker News Reader

I thought decorum dictated that an aged post should have the year in brackets or something similar! A lot has changed in the last 8 & half years.

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He says

"When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough."

So that hasn't changed.

This is FUD. It's really not difficult to use the mb_* family of functions to deal with unicode in PHP. If you're writing a new app, this is trivial. If you're working with an existing app, it's obviously more difficult, but far, far from impossible.

Of course you can manipulate utf-8 in PHP, else it would have died long ago. But as a matter of fact PHP 6 was a failure, and unicode is still an afterthought that you must hack around with special functions in PHP5.

Well, there's almost no string handling built-in to PHP as a language at all, it's just provided as part of the standard library. So instead of using one part of the library (the standard string functions), you use another (the mb_* string functions.) I don't really see how that's a hack. The one thing that could go wrong is if you don't have the mb_* extension, but that's easily rectified, and hasn't been something I've seen in the wild in the past few years.

I'm not saying PHP's UTF-8 handling is great by any means, but the claim was that it's "nearly impossible." I'm suggesting that one should instead say "Building a UTF-8 compliant site in PHP is annoying, and requires more work than one would prefer, but if you do a bit of research, it's not that hard."

> I don't really see how that's a hack.

Because if you switch encoding you need to modify the code. All languages actually supporting utf-8 use the very same functions whatever the encoding is, eventually you simply need to declare that you're using utf-8 but that's all.

What has changed in regard to the substance of the post?

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