With the releases in the PHP 5.x series (5.3 and now a newly branched 5.4), people have been left wondering about PHP 6 and the promised Unicode support it will include. Development on that branch had all but stalled out and things weren't looking too good for the method of introducing full Unicode support to the language. Johannes Schluter has some good news, though - the effort has been restarted and a new approach has been decided on.

Yesterday the stagnation created by the situation has been resolved and it was decided that our trunk in svn will be based on 5.3 and we'll merge features from the old trunk and new features there so that 5.3 will be a true stable branch. The EOL for 5.2 has not yet been defined but I suggest you to really migrate over to 5.3, which usually can be done with very little work, as soon as possible.

Discussion are being made about which type of Unicode support will actually be introduced with a "string class" wrapper gathering some support behind it to provide an alternative to the current string handling.