#php6

[myblogknowswhatyoudidinthedaaark]

Have you guys checked this out yet? I Prevail burst onto the scene with their cover of Blank Space and it's now included in the Pop Goes Punk series on the re-release of 6.

[mycupofphp]

Sometimes we will get an idea that would create something our limited foresight says will be beautiful. We chase after the idea, regardless of everything. We have unicorns in programming. This morning I want to talk briefly about the approach some of us are trying to make in adding Unicode string support to PHP7.

[mycupofphp]

There's been a lot of buzz in the community lately around PHP and its future. The vast majority of this buzz has been distinctly positive, which is awesome to hear. There's been a lot of talk about PHP6 and what that might look like. There's been a lot of questions around HHVM and its role in the future of the language and community. Well, let me share with you some of my thoughts in this space... 

[hasitha]

Handling UTF-8 with Codeigniter

For one of the projects I'm working on, I had to write a script that fetches RSS feeds from various sources and stores them in a database periodically. My initial thought was to use SimplePie, and write a PHP script which then gets called repeatedly via CRON. However, given the number of sources I'd have to pull posts from etc, I decided instead to go with Python. The idea was to write the feed parsing bit in Python and then to display these posts using Codeigniter (since that's what the full application was written in)

So, I wrote a quick python script with Universal Feed Parser, which worked great. But, I started noticing that some of the sources I was pulling data from had a lot of UTF-8 characters.

Now, Python is brilliant at handling UTF-8. But PHP... not so much (which hopefully would change with PHP6). I hadn't run into UTF-8 related issues with any of the applications I've developed till now. So this was a bit of a curve ball.

The way to tackle this involves a few steps

Install the "mbstring" PHP extension

Configure your php.ini file to use the extension

Change the database and each of the tables over to UTF-8 (Under MySQL, you can use "utf8_general_ci")

Modify various helpers in Codeigniter to take into account UTF-8 (more details in the liks below)

Optionally, write your own helper to convert UTF-8 characters to regular single byte characters

This sounded like a pretty daunting task at first, but the following blog posts helped me out immensly. Everything listed above is clearly explained in the posts below. Also, pay close attention to the comments under those posts as well, because they have fixes for some "gotchas" the original posters had missed.

http://philsturgeon.co.uk/news/2009/08/UTF-8-support-for-CodeIgniter This covers the database side of things quite a bit

http://www.haughin.com/2010/02/23/building-utf8-compatible-codeigniter-applications This covers more of the PHP side of things and the changes to the Codeigniter helpers

http://hash-bang.net/2009/02/utf8-with-codeigniter Offers a helper function that converts incoming POST data into MySQL compatible UTF8 and convert outgoing text into HTML UTF8 streams.