Rasmus Lerdorf has shared a post to his site detailing how he upgraded his EdgeRouter Lite router (hardware) to use PHP 7 for the uI handling and processing, upgrading it from the PHP 5.4 it came installed with.

After nearly 7 years of service I retired my Asus RT-16 router, which wasn't really a router, but a re-purposed wifi access point running AdvancedTomato. In its place I got a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It is Debian-based and has a dual-core 500MHz 64-Bit MIPS CPU (Cavium Octeon+), 512M of ram and a 4G removable onboard USB stick for < $100. The router is completely open and, in fact, any advanced configuration has to be done from the command line. The Web UI has been improving, but there are still many things you can't do in it. In other words, exactly the type of device I prefer.

He made use of the open platform the router has to upgrade both the PHP installation and a bit of the web UI code to make things work happily with PHP 7. There's just three steps in his process:

• Getting a Big-Endian MIPS64 build of PHP 7
• Configuration (php.ini)
• Fixing broken stuff

The "broken stuff" in this last item was only a few small changes that needed to be made to the web UI code for raw POST data fetching and session writes. He ends the post with a little summary of the performance post-changes and some about the opcode handling and memory use per request.

Edd Mann looks at an issue in his latest post that caused him problems in a recent project, reversing a Unicode string with UTF-16BE/LE.

Last week I was bit by the Unicode encoding issue when trying to naively manipulate a user's input using PHP's built-in string functions. PHP simply assumes that all characters are a single byte (octet) and the provided functions use this assumption when processing a string. [...] You should be aware that in 'Western Europe' we commonly only use the basic ASCII character-set (consisting of 7 bytes). This makes the transition to the popular 'UTF-8' Unicode representation almost seamless, as the two map one-to-one. I wish to however, discuss how to reverse a Unicode string (UTF-8) using a combination of endianness magic and the 'strrev' function.

He provides two different approaches to the problem. The first he calls the "naive" approach because it corrupts characters needing more than the two-byte representation. His second solution, the "endianness" method, converts the string to big-endian first (UTF-16) and then back to UTF-8 for more correct handling.