Nicolas Grekas has shared another tool that he's pulled out of his "Patchwork" framework to make it a stand-alone tool: the Patchwork-UTF8 helper that provides matching functions to those PHP already has for regular strings, but a little smarter to work with UTF8 correctly.

The PatchworkUtf8 class implements the quasi complete set of string functions that need UTF-8 grapheme clusters awareness. These functions are all static methods of the PatchworkUtf8 class. The best way to use them is to add a use PatchworkUtf8 as u; at the beginning of your files, then when UTF-8 awareness is required, prefix by u:: when calling them.

In the README for the tool he talks about the functions included in the current release that match PHP's string functions as well as some additional methods like "isUtf8", "bestFit" and "strtocasefold". It relies on the mbstring, iconv and intl extensions being installed, and if they aren't, it falls back to other functionality (list of those methods included).

Nicolas Grekas has submitted about a new tool he's developed to "represent faithfully any PHP variable as complex as it is" - Patchwork-Doc (related to his Patchwork PHP framework).

The JSON format on which it rests guarantees maximum interoperability while ensuring good readability. The implementation done in the JsonDumper class operates all potentialities of the representation while providing maximum latitude to the developer to exploit its ability as desired, both in term of exposure of internal class mechanism for specialization and in terms of custom use, thanks to the callbacks that allow to intercept the JSON line by line and to adjust the dumping of objects or resources according to their type.

It isn't required to use the framework to use this tool, however. You can see an example of the output format in this example on the project's github page, complete with a guide to some of the advantages and disadvantages of some of the current, more common methods of output. Several types are included in the example including simple string/integer values, objects, classes, stream resources and the results of variable casting.