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.

Johannes Schluter briefly touches on unicode in PHP6 in a new post to his blog and how being able to use it in identifiers can come in quite handy at times.

Consider you have an application tied to an environment with a special terminology, then translating this terms to English might be extremely confusing (especially as programmers often don't really know the correct terminology of that domain) and it's good to call the thing by it's name [...] The purpose of this were some bad news: That's nothing new. The relevant scanner rule hasn't changed since 4.0 - the only change is that PHP 6 doesn't treat it as random set of bytes anymore but knows about Unicode codepoints and interprets is as such.

After digging around a bit in some of the commit history of PHP, Johannes also found that the scanner rule (what parses the identifiers) hasn't changed since around 2000 and, apparently, won't be changing for PHP6 either.

Sean Coates has reposted an article that was originally published in php|architect magazine covering UTF-8 and proper Unicode encoding.

If I had to guess, I would estimate that I've spent somewhere in the range of 40 hours wrangling UTF-8 in the past 3 months, which is not only expensive for my employer, but also disheartening as a developer who's got real work to do. Admittedly, this number is inflated, due to the heavy development cycle we completed with the launch of our new site.

Sean goes on to talk about Unicode issues in general (partially supported in some places, too many points of failure) and some of his other experiences with "the UTF-8 monster" that have given him trouble over time.

In a new post to his blog, Vinu Thomas talks about a set of functions that can make your life easier when handling unicode strings - the mb_* methods of the mbstring extension.

When dealing with multiple languages and internalization in PHP, some of the default functions in PHP end up mangling up the unicode characters in PHP. This is evident when you have a lot of funny looking characters coming up on your web page instead of the actual characters. [...] There is an extensions called mbstring which you can install in PHP which gives you a set of functions which are unicode ( actually multibyte ) ready.

He mentions some of the replacements like mb_send_mail instead o fmail and mb_strlen instead of the usual strlen. Thankfully, there's a simple way to make use of these functions without having to replace a lot of code - a setting in your php.ini (mbstring.func_overload) that tells your application to seamlessly replace things behind the scenes.

Wen Huang has made a quick post to his blog about some of the comments Andrei Zmievski about the future of PHP, specifically on internationalization and UTF-8's place in it.

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.

On the ThinkPHP blog, Florian Eibeck has posted an overview of some key things to consider when internationalizing your application/website.

The biggest problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalisation, Localisation, Character encodings, Unicode and all those terms connected with multilingualism. The following article should give you a basic understanding and show you how to avoid those funny characters.

He defines a few terms - internationalization, ASCII, unicode and the UTF-8/ISO-8859 character sets. He mentions how to accept the utf-8 string into your application and how to use it in both PHP and store it in a MySQL database.

In a new post on the IBM developerWorks page, Nathan Good takes a look at some of the features of the up and coming versions of the PHP language including things like namespaces, changes in the XML handling and a few things taken out.

PHP's next edition, V6, includes new features and syntax improvements that will make it easier to use from an object-oriented standpoint. Other important features, such as Unicode support in many of the core functions, mean that PHP V6 is positioned for better international support and robustness.

New features he mentions include namespace support, improvements to the native Unicode support as well as a few of the things that will be permanently retired like the php.ini settings for magic_quotes and register_globals.

The main PHP.net website has posted a list of people participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project on various PHP projects. These include:

• PHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick Rethans
• gsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-Yang Lee, mentored by David Coallier
• PHP Bindings for Cairo by Akshat Gupta, mentored by Anant Narayanan
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6 by Henrique do Nascimento Angelo, mentored by Scott MacVicar

You can check out more information on the projects (including links to their individual pages) on this page of the Google Code website.

On the Make Me Pulse blog, there's a look at PHP6's support of Unicode in the SPL (Standard PHP Library) TextIterator handler.

I've just install the last version of PHP6 dev and I've decided to test the famous new feature, the PHP Unicode Support. I will not explain new things about PHP6 or Unicode or TextIterator, it's just my discoveries test on this features.

He steps through the process he followed - enabling Unicode support, testing various output methods (including just an echo and using the TextIterator) as well as some of the manipulation methods (next/first/current) that can be used to get certain characters out of a string.

Internationalizing a website can bring all sorts of challenges, as Markus Wolff found out when working on a recent project:

When you're building international websites, there's always something new to learn. Especially if one of the languages your website is available in uses a character set different from anything you're used to. For jimdo.com, the greatest challenge as of yet is the chinese version.

His focus isn't so much on the content of the page but on one small character that caused him headaches - the comma. Unfortunately, it seems that Unicode has its own commas that don't quite adhere to the "normal" rules to make them easy to work with (and, in his case, split with a regular expression). The fix to the situation was simple, though - adding a "u" modifier after the expression made it Unicode-aware and split the information correctly.