On Andrei Zmievski's blog today, there's a new post looking at new features of the upcoming PHP6 series - specifically dealing with internationalization and Unicode support.

I have been working on the Unicode support in PHP for quite a while now and I figure that it is time to start talking about Unicode and I18N in general and specifically about some of the new features that PHP 6 will be bringing to the table.

He first covers the new TextIterator class, as "swiss-army kife-like" tool that gives the user abilities to work with text units (really their boundaries) in a simple, normalized way. Of course, definitions and code follow to illustrate the point with examples ranging from interpreting a string out to grabbing certain bits of the string.

He also introduces the opposite twin of the TextIterator class - ReverseTextIterator. It's basic function is to (basically) do everything its twin does, only in reverse.