Recently on his blog Yannick has done some benchmarking comparing mbstring and iconv in PHP 5.2.4 release.

Following up on my previous post about the differences between the mbstring and iconv international characters libraries (which resulted in a tentative conclusion that nobody knew anything about those differences), and particularly the comments by Nicola, we have combined forces (mostly efforts from Nicola, actually) to provide you with a little benchmarking, if that can help you decide.

His code for the test script is included (for you to gather your own results) and a full listing of his results comparing the effects of possible caching, running up to ten executions. You can download the text file that he ran the script on here.

Hasin Hayder has written up a quick tutorial for his blog that shows how to create your own "Today in History" page with details from Scopesys pulled with a little web scraping.

There are thousands of services available on web who are presenting interesting as well as education information which you can really integrate in your web page or make a nice widget and let others use them seamlessly with their content delivery platforms. In this article I am going to show you how you can make a nice Today-in-History widget with the help of the data provided in Scopesys.

He wisely recommends that you check one thing first about the content you're grabbing - the copyright it carries with it. This could get you into big trouble down the line depending on whose content it is. The actual script is pretty simple - he defines some constants as markers for where things start and stop in the HTML and then uses strpos to get the locations for his substr call to grab the segments.

In this post on the Dokeos blog, there's a comparison of the mbstring function and the iconv library as it pertains to their use on multi-byte strings.

I was wondering today why use mbstring rather than iconv in Dokeos, and honestly I didn't remember exactly why I had chosen mbstring in the past, but finding information about the *differences* between the two. [...] Searching a bit more, I found a PPT presentation from Carlos Hoyos on Google.

Essentially, it boils down to how the library is integrated - mbstring is bundled and iconv is pulled from an external source. So, if you're looking for maximum portability, he recommends mbstring.

PHP-GTKers working in English-related applications, don't have a problem with debugging messages output to a console when debugging, but applications on a more international front have issues with their output. But help has been found in this new post on the Riff Blog - a method for correctly encoding PHP-GTK applications.

PHP scripts are typically stored under UTF-8 encoding to limit i18n headaches, while the console in which their output will be displayed is normally configured to some regional encoding, like IBM850 in Windows/XP French.

So we need a workaround...

He splits the process out into a few steps, each with its own explanation and code:

• Builtin tools
• Buffering
• Flushing
• PHP-GTK is not PHP for the Web
• Auto-flushing

All wrapped up with a final solution - using the iconv functionality in combination with some output buffering to correctly display the message.

One of the more underused thechnologies to come along these days is XSLT - that powerful langauge to style XML documents in a simple, "more correct" kind of way (seperation of data and layout). Most languages have support for this combination, including PHP - but what's the best way to combine PHP and XSLT? Christian Stocker took a look in this new post on the Bitflux blog.

After Rob's idea from yesterday about using XMLReader within XSLT I was wondering, how much of a slowdown calling PHP functions from XSLT is.

I wrote 4 different XSLT templates, which do a simple substring. One with the xslt function "substring", one with just calling the native PHP function "substr" and one with calling a user-defined function (which is also just calling "substr"). I called this 100 times (with one of those great recursive self-calling xslt-templates) and did call the "transformToXML" function a 100 times for each stylesheet. This means, we called the function 10'000 times for each benchmark run.

His bases the results off of a sample with no function call at all and, but running it through 100 times, came up with results that weren't all that surprising. In order of speed, the ranking (shortest time first) was: no call, xslt only, php native, and php userland. Using the PHP functions from inside of XSLT made the test quite a bit slower, but, as he notes, most users won't be running recursions of 100 each time they run a script.

Christian Stocker has a quick new post with a solution for those Mac users out there that would like to use the iconv extension with fink.

If you want to get the iconv extension properly running with PHP 5 and fink on OS X, you need the following configure option

--with-iconv=/sw/

and then it should work.

Hope that helps others, too.

And, apparently, it does - given the one comment below it so far that has a positive response...