Article:		Why PHP 5 Rocks!
Subject:		Unfortunately, PHP5 sucks no less than PHP4
Date:		2004-07-16 14:49:01
From:		zgoda
It still doesn't have native unicode support, so all this XML buzz is just that -- a buzz. In modern world lacking of unicode awareness makes any solution incomplete.

Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4.

• Unfortunately, PHP5 sucks no less than PHP4
  2006-05-08 10:25:36  zorgalina [Reply | View]
  
  
  That is not the only reason why PHP sucks, but I agree with you, without unicode support PHP should not be a first choice for web programming.

• Unfortunately, PHP5 sucks no less than PHP4
  2004-07-16 15:40:31  Adam Trachtenberg | [Reply | View]
  
  
  Unicode support is on my list of things that would be great to add to PHP 6. :)
  
  But seriously, my Perl core language friends told me that incorporating Unicode into Perl was damn difficult and opened up all sorts of issues. So, while Unicode is necessary, it needs to be done correctly, and with all the new features in PHP 5, I don't think now is the right time.
  
  Also, PHP 5 uses libxml2 to power its XML extensions, so you can use UTF-8 and other character encodings in your XML documents. You just may need to jump through a few hoops to get your data in there.
• Unfortunately, PHP5 sucks no less than PHP4
  2004-07-17 00:05:41  zgoda [Reply | View]
  
  
  The problem is, that these "hoops" require at least iconv extension (which is is not build by default) and these "hoops" may be quite large if you have mix of, say, Turkish and Russian in your XML content.
• Unfortunately, PHP5 sucks no less than PHP4
  2004-07-17 00:25:33  Adam Trachtenberg | [Reply | View]
  
  
  Actually, as of PHP 5, iconv is now enabled by default. That's one of the few new things I didn't mention in my article.
  
  And, yes, the hoops are larger when you're mixing non-Western character sets. But what are you going to do?
  
  I'm sure if you were to produce a patch, the PHP community would gladly accept it. After all, two of the key developers of PHP are from Israel, and I know Hebrew isn't easily represented in ASCII.