[thelist] Arabic language website and streaming fonts

[kasimir-k]

Birdie scribeva in 31/03/2006 6:27:
> So when building sites that need UTF-8 is it better to build in another
> language other than PHP such as ASP or will the problems just be the same ?

No, you just need to beware of the potential issues - then PHP is just fine.

The fundamental thing here is, that for PHP one character equals to one 
byte - but with all Unicode encodings (UTF-8 being often the most 
usable) one character may need more than one byte. Wikipedia article on 
UTF-8[0] is a concise and worthwhile read having a nice table on how 
many bytes each character range needs with UTF-8 and UTF-16.

But PHP can deal with multibyte characters using Multibyte String 
Functions[1]. MySQL can deal with UTF-8 without problems too[2], since 
4.1 IIRC.

.k



[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
[1]http://php.net/mbstring
[2]http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-unicode.html