Warning |
This extension is EXPERIMENTAL. The behaviour of this extension, including the names of its functions, and anything else documented about this extension may change in a future release of PHP without notice. Be warned and use this extension at your own risk. |
Warning |
This module is EXPERIMENTAL. Function name/API is subject to change. Current conversion filter supports Japanese only. |
There are many languages in which all characters can be expressed by single byte. Multi-byte character codes are used to express many characters for many languages. mbstring is developed to handle Japanese characters. However, many mbstring functions are able to handle character encoding other than Japanese.
A multi-byte character encoding represents single character with consecutive bytes. Some character encoding has shift(escape) sequences to start/end multi-byte character strings. Therefore, a multi-byte character string may be destroyed when it is divided and/or counted unless multi-byte character encoding safe method is used. This module provides multi-byte character safe string functions and other utility functions such as conversion functions.
Since PHP is basically designed for ISO-8859-1, some multi-byte character encoding does not work well with PHP. Therefore, it is important to set mbstring.internal_encoding to a character encoding that works with PHP.
PHP4 Character Encoding Requirements
Per byte encoding
Single byte characters in range of 00h-7fh which is compatible with ASCII
Multi-byte characters without 00h-7fh
These are examples of internal character encoding that works with PHP and does NOT work with PHP.
Character encodings work with PHP: ISO-8859-*, EUC-JP, UTF-8 Character encodings do NOT work with PHP: JIS, SJIS |
Character encoding, that does not work with PHP, may be converted with mbstring's HTTP input/output conversion feature/function.
Note: SJIS should not be used for internal encoding unless the reader is familiar with parser/compiler, character encoding and character encoding issues.
Note: If you use database with PHP, it is recommended that you use the same character encoding for both database and internal encoding for ease of use and better performance.
If you are using PostgreSQL, it supports character encoding that is different from backend character encoding. See the PostgreSQL manual for details.
mbstring is an extended module. You must enable module with configure script. Refer to the Install section for details.
The following configure options are related to mbstring module.
--enable-mbstring : Enable mbstring functions. This option is required to use mbstring functions.
--enable-mbstr-enc-trans : Enable HTTP input character encoding conversion using mbstring conversion engine. If this feature is enabled, HTTP input character encoding may be converted to mbstring.internal_encoding automatically.
HTTP input/output character encoding conversion may convert binary data also. Users are supposed to control character encoding conversion if binary data is used for HTTP input/output.
If enctype for HTML form is set to multipart/form-data, mbstring does not convert character encoding in POST data. If it is the case, strings are needed to be converted to internal character encoding.
HTTP Input
There is no way to control HTTP input character conversion from PHP script. To disable HTTP input character conversion, it has to be done in php.ini.
When using PHP as an Apache module, it is possible to override PHP ini setting per Virtual Host in httpd.conf or per directory with .htaccess. Refer to the Configuration section and Apache Manual for details.
HTTP Output
There are several ways to enable output character encoding conversion. One is using php.ini, another is using ob_start() with mb_output_handler() as ob_start callback function.
Note: For PHP3-i18n users, mbstring's output conversion differs from PHP3-i18n. Character encoding is converted using output buffer.
Currently, the following character encoding is supported by mbstring module. Caracter encoding may be specified for mbstring functions' encoding parameter.
The following character encoding is supported in this PHP extension :
UCS-4, UCS-4BE, UCS-4LE, UCS-2, UCS-2BE, UCS-2LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE, UCS-2LE, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-8, UTF-7, ASCII, EUC-JP, SJIS, eucJP-win, SJIS-win, ISO-2022-JP, JIS, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5, ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-15, byte2be, byte2le, byte4be, byte4le, BASE64, 7bit, 8bit and UTF7-IMAP.
php.ini entry, which accepts encoding name, accepts "auto" and "pass" also. mbstring functions, which accepts encoding name, and accepts "auto".
If "pass" is set, no character encoding conversion is performed.
If "auto" is set, it is expanded to "ASCII,JIS,UTF-8,EUC-JP,SJIS".
See also mb_detect_order()
Note: "Supported character encoding" does not mean that it works as internal character code.
mbstring.internal_encoding defines default internal character encoding.
mbstring.http_input defines default HTTP input character encoding.
mbstring.http_output defines default HTTP output character encoding.
mbstring.detect_order defines default character code detection order. See also mb_detect_order().
mbstring.substitute_character defines character to substitute for invalid character encoding.
Web Browsers are supposed to use the same character encoding when submitting form. However, browsers may not use the same character encoding. See mb_http_input() to detect character encoding used by browsers.
If enctype is set to multipart/form-data in HTML forms, mbstring does not convert character encoding in POST data. The user must convert them in the script, if conversion is needed.
Although, browsers are smart enough to detect character encoding in HTML. charset is better to be set in HTTP header. Change default_charset according to character encoding.
Example 5. php.ini setting for EUC-JP users
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Example 6. php.ini setting for SJIS users
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Most Japanese characters need more than 1 byte per character. In addition, several character encoding schemas are used under a Japanese environment. There are EUC-JP, Shift_JIS(SJIS) and ISO-2022-JP(JIS) character encoding. As Unicode becomes popular, UTF-8 is used also. To develop Web applications for a Japanese environment, it is important to use the character set for the task in hand, whether HTTP input/output, RDBMS and E-mail.
Storage for a character can be up to six bytes
A multi-byte character is usually twice of the width compared to single-byte characters. Wider characters are called "zen-kaku" - meaning full width, narrower characters are called "han-kaku" - meaning half width. "zen-kaku" characters are usually fixed width.
Some character encoding defines shift(escape) sequence for entering/exiting multi-byte character strings.
ISO-2022-JP must be used for SMTP/NNTP.
"i-mode" web site is supposed to use SJIS.
Multi-byte character encoding and its related issues are very complex. It is impossible to cover in sufficient detail here. Please refer to the following URLs and other resources for further readings.
Unicode/UTF/UCS/etc
http://www.unicode.org/
Japanese/Korean/Chinese character information
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/nutshell/ujip/doc/cjk.inf