PHP Smarty Templates - Re: [SMARTY] Smarty and Unicode

Author

Re: [SMARTY] Smarty and Unicode

Marcus Bointon

2006-02-28, 7:04 pm

On 28 Feb 2006, at 17:28, Vicente Werner wrote:

> My experience is that it just works, no need to do anything -I made
> a BIG, BIG proyect on it- the main issue with unicode, it's not
> smarty, it's PHP itself.
> PHP has a terrible problem with it, since it's not supported
> natively and the mb extension just sucks -in order to be useable it
> should be a full replacement for all string related functions,
> which is not

Yup, I've been keeping tabs on the progress of PHP 6, and I watched a
database system do the big switch a couple of years ago. Given the
lack of unicode safety in PHP, I would expect to run into problems
with things like modifier plugins - all it takes is a single
preg_replace or str_replace and it's going to break, so I was
wondering how you go about ensuring that doesn't happen.

Marcus
--
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Putting you in the picture
marcus@synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk

Marcus Bointon

2006-02-28, 7:04 pm

On 28 Feb 2006, at 17:57, Vicente Werner wrote:

> Regex don't even work, so if you're goin' to use regular
> expressions, you're out of luck for non latin languages

So given that it apparently does work, is it therefore true that the
Smarty compiler and all standard plugins are regex-free?

Marcus
--
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Putting you in the picture
marcus@synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk

messju mohr

2006-02-28, 7:04 pm

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 06:07:32PM +0000, Marcus Bointon wrote:
> On 28 Feb 2006, at 17:57, Vicente Werner wrote:
>
>
> So given that it apparently does work, is it therefore true that the
> Smarty compiler and all standard plugins are regex-free?

no. first of all: all plugins that care about encoding (like
capitalize, lower or truncate) may not (or very likely won't) work.

regearding regexes: i don't see a problem why an ascii reges shouldn't
match on utf-input. if you stick to ascii with with your variable
names and identifiers, then utf-8 templates should be transparent to
smarty.

> Marcus
> --
> Marcus Bointon
> Synchromedia Limited: Putting you in the picture
> marcus@synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk
>
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> Smarty General Mailing List (http://smarty.php.net/)
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boots

2006-02-28, 7:04 pm

--- Marcus Bointon <marcus@synchromedia.co.uk> wrote:
> On 28 Feb 2006, at 17:57, Vicente Werner wrote:
>
> So given that it apparently does work, is it therefore true that the
> Smarty compiler and all standard plugins are regex-free?

I'm not following this discussion but that statement is fallacious -- Smarty is
very much built on regex parsing. perhaps the problem is defining "it works".
:)

xo boots

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Marcus Bointon

2006-03-01, 7:01 pm

On 1 Mar 2006, at 08:53, Vicente Werner wrote:

> Yes, but what I was referring to in my email to Marcus was that if the
> variable contents you need to modify were UTF-8 strings you might
> get very
> strange results since php regex will treat that utf-8 string like
> an ASCII
> one.

I only really see a potential problem with modifiers. As Boots said,
as long as Smarty treats stuff inside and outside the delimiters
consistently, Unicode's ASCII compatibility should just let it work
transparently.

I've done some experiments and it does indeed 'just work' - getting
stuff in and out of the DB is similarly transparent (and yes I am
using mysql_real_escape_string!). It's safe to have UTF-8 templates,
though it seems sensible to keep scripts as iso-8859-1 (though it
also worked as UTF-8, including literal unicode text in strings).

I've no particular need to use UTF-8 variable or file names, so I'm
happy to simply avoid that issue.

It seems I 'only' need to pay attention to modifiers and validation
functions (strlen, trim and friends). It might be a good opportunity
to make my validation more modular so that when PHP 6 comes along I
can swap it all out easily.

> That issue has made me turn my back on PHP until version 6, where
> it'll be
> solved -I hope, unless zend gets a new stupid idea again and
> decides to put
> the effort in adding better support for .net, or anythin' like that-

While I agree that PHP should probably have sorted this one out
earlier, I have a fairly large codebase and can't afford to switch
environments now. Plus there's too much other good stuff in PHP ;^)

Thanks for all your help,

Marcus
--
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Putting you in the picture
marcus@synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk

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