Articles Tagged with “Unicode”

05/02/2008: Looking Ahead to Perl 6

One of the most important changes in Perl 6 over earlier versions is that it has started out as a written specification, which may end up with several different implementations. In previous versions of Perl, alternative versions had to implement all the quirks of the official Perl interpreter, as the definition of the Perl language was “whatever the Perl interpreter will interpret”, which was (of course) a moving target, as each released version introduced new features and changed existing behaviour (though usually only on the peripheries of the language). The lack of a stable written specification killed off many useful projects, such as the Perl compiler (perlcc).

The written specification is what allows me to write this article right now, as the current implementations of Perl 6 are only partial — indeed, the specification is not yet complete, but I can comment on those parts that have been written. There are way too many changes to touch on them all, but I’ll try to write about some of the most…

29/01/2008: Looking Ahead to PHP 6

This is my look at what’s planned for the forthcoming revision to the PHP language.

Removal of Deprecated Features

PHP 6 includes a lot of tidying up, removing features of the language that have caused annoyance, confusion and security headaches. Although these changes are too numerous to list here, and the list will probably change before the official release, here are three of the major ones:

• PHP has for some time included two different regular expression libraries: POSIX Regex and PCRE. PCRE is both faster and more capable, so in PHP 6, the POSIX Regex library will be removed from the PHP core and exist only as an optional extension.
• PHP includes a feature called register_globals, which automatically creates global variables for any data provided to a script through an HTTP…

21/03/2007: PHP UTF-8 Validation Library

lawrence k wrote:

What PHP code would give me this kind of 100% certainty?

I was bored so wrote this. I’m quite proud of myself, as I wrote it and ran it and it worked first time! :-)

It not only checks that the UTF-8 is valid, it forces it to be valid…