PHP string functions vs mbstring functions

Question

I have an application that has so far been in English only. Content encoding throughout templates and database has been UTF-8. I am now looking to internationalize/translate the

Answer 1

No. Since bytearrays are also strings in PHP, a simple replacement of the 8-bit string functions with their mb_* counterparts will cause nothing but trouble. Functions like strlen() and substr() are probably more frequently used with bytes than actual text strings.

At the place I last worked, we managed to build a multilingual web-site (Arabic, Hindi, among other languages) in PHP without using the mbstring library at all. Text string manipulation actually doesn't happen that often. When it does, it would require far more care than just changing a function name. Most of the challenges, I've found, lie on the HTML side. Getting a page layout to work with a RTL language is the non-trivial part.

I don't know if you're just using Arabic as an example. The difficulty of internationalization can vary quite substantially depending on whether "international" means European languages only (plus Russian), or if it's inclusive of Middle-Eastern, South-Asian, and Far-East languages.

Answer 2

The number of multibyte functions really needed are under 10, so create 3 or 5 questions whether the usage of the function or logic is good. This quesiton is obsecure and hard to answer. Small questions can get quick answers. Concrete questions can bring out good answers. let me know when you create other questions.

If you need use cases, see the fallback functions in CMSes such as Wordpress, MediaWiki, Drupal.

When you decide to start using mbstring, You should avoid using mbstring.func_overload directive. Mbstring maintainers are going to deprecate mbstring.func_overload in PHP 5.5 or 5.6 (see PHP core mailing list in 2012 April). mbstring.func_overload breaks the codebases that are not expected to use mbstring.func_overload. you can see the cases in CakePHP, Zend Framework 1x in caliculating Content-Length by using strlen().

I answerd the similar question in another place: Should i refactor all my framework to use mbstring functions?

Answer 3

Check the status of the mbstring.func_overload flag in php.ini

If (ini_get('mbstring.func_overload') & 2) then functions like strlen() (as listed here) are already overloaded by the mb_strlen() function, so there is no need for you to call the mb_* functions explicitly.