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Subject: [PHP-DEV] PHP Unicode support design document
From: Andrei Zmievski <andrei () gravitonic ! com>
Date: 2005-08-10 7:31:30
Message-ID: 937066F0-AA5F-41E2-99A0-D74C7F44FFCA () gravitonic ! com
[Download RAW message or body]
Before we go breaking things, please read this document that
describes how PHP will support the Unicode standard natively.
Hopefully the attachment will work.
Thanks,
-Andrei
["php-unicode-design.txt" (php-unicode-design.txt)]
Introduction
============
As successful as PHP has proven to be in the past several years, it is still
the only remaining member of the P-trinity of scripting languages - Perl and
Python being the other two - that remains blithely ignorant of the
multilingual and multinational environment around it. The software
development community has been moving towards Unicode Standard for some time
now, and PHP can no longer afford to be outside of this movement. Surely,
some steps have been taken recently to allow for easier processing of
multibyte data with the mbstring extension, but it is not enabled in PHP by
default and is not as intuitive or transparent as it could be.
The basic goal of this document is to describe how PHP 6 will support the
Unicode Standard natively. Since the full implementation of the Unicode
Standard is very involved, the idea is to use the already existing,
well-tested, full-featured, and freely available ICU (International
Components for Unicode) library. This will allow us to concentrate on the
details of PHP integration and speed up the implementation.
General Remarks
===============
Backwards Compatibility
-----------------------
Throughout the design and implementation of Unicode support, backwards
compatibility must be of paramount concern. PHP is used on an enormous number of
sites and the upgrade to Unicode-enabled PHP has to be transparent. This means
that the existing data types and functions must work as they have always
done. However, the speed of certain operations may be affected, due to
increased complexity of the code overall.
Unicode Encoding
----------------
The initial version will not support Byte Order Mark. Characters are
expected to be composed, Normalization Form C. Later versions will support
BOM, and decomposed and other characters.
Implementation Approach
=======================
The implementation is done in phases. This allows for more basic and
low-level implementation issues to be ironed out and tested before
proceeding to more advanced topics.
Legend:
- TODO
+ finished
* in progress
Phase I
-------
+ Basic Unicode string support, including instantiation, concatenation,
indexing
+ Simple output of Unicode strings via 'print' and 'echo' statements
with appropriate output encoding conversion
+ Conversion of Unicode strings to/from various encodings via encode() and
decode() functions
+ Determining length of Unicode strings via strlen() function, some
simple string functions ported (substr).
Phase II
--------
* HTTP input request decoding
+ Fixing remaining string-aware operators (assignment to {}, etc)
+ Comparison (collation) of Unicode strings with built-in operators
* Support for Unicode and binary strings in PHP streams
+ Support for Unicode identifiers
* Configurable handling of conversion failures
+ \C{} escape sequence in strings
Phase III
---------
* Exposing ICU API
- Porting all remaining functions to support Unicode and/or binary
strings
Encoding Names
==============
All the encoding settings discussed in this document accept any valid
encoding name supported by ICU. See ICU online documentation for the full
list of encodings.
Internal Encoding
=================
UTF-16 is the internal encoding used for Unicode strings. UTF-16 consumes
two bytes for any Unicode character in the Basic Multilingual Plane, which
is where most of the current world's languages are represented. While being
less memory efficient for basic ASCII text it simplifies the processing and
makes interfacing with ICU easier, since ICU uses UTF-16 for its internal
processing as well.
Fallback Encoding
=================
This setting specifies the "fallback" encoding for all the other ones. So if
a specific encoding setting is not set, PHP defaults it to the fallback
encoding. If the fallback_encoding is not specified either, it is set to
UTF-8.
fallback_encoding = "iso-8859-1"
Runtime Encoding
================
Currently PHP neither specifies nor cares what the encoding of its strings
is. However, the Unicode implementation needs to know what this encoding is
for several reasons, including type coersion and encoding conversion for
strings generated at runtime via function calls and casting. This setting
specifies this runtime encoding.
runtime_encoding = "iso-8859-1"
Output Encoding
===============
Automatic output encoding conversion is supported on the standard output
stream. Therefore, command such as 'print' and 'echo' automatically convert
their arguments to the specified encoding. No automatic output encoding is
performed for anything else. Therefore, when writing to files or external
resources, the developer has to manually encode the data using functions
provided by the unicode extension or rely on stream encoding filters. The
unicode extension provides necessary stream filters to make developers'
lives easier.
The existing default_charset setting so far has been used only for
specifying the charset portion of the Content-Type MIME header. For several
reasons, this setting is deprecated. Now it is only used when the Unicode
semantics switch is disabled and does not affect the actual transcoding of
the output stream. The output encoding setting takes precedence in all other
cases.
output_encoding = "utf-8"
HTTP Input Encoding
===================
To make accessing HTTP input variables easier, PHP automatically decodes
HTTP GET and POST requests based on the specified encoding. If the HTTP
request contains the encoding specification in the headers, then it will be
used instead of this setting. If the HTTP input encoding setting is not
specified, PHP falls back onto the output encoding setting, because modern
browsers are supposed to return the data in the same encoding as they
received it in.
If the actual encoding is passed in the request itself or is found
elsewhere, then the application can ask PHP to re-decode the raw input
explicitly.
http_input_encoding = "utf-8"
Script Encoding
===============
PHP scripts may be written in any encoding supported by ICU. The encoding
of the scripts can be specified site-wide via an INI directive
script_encoding, or with a 'declare' pragma at the beginning of the script.
The reason for pragma is that an application written in Shift-JIS, for
example, should be executable on a system where the INI directive cannot be
changed by the application itself. The pragma setting is valid only for the
script it occurs in, and does not propagate to the included files.
pragma:
<?php declare(encoding = 'utf-8'); ?>
INI setting:
script_encoding = utf-8
Conversion Semantics
====================
Not all characters can be converted between Unicode and legacy encodings.
Normally, when downconverting from Unicode, the default behavior of ICU
converters is to substitute the missing sequence with the appropriate
substitution sequence for that codepage, such as 0x1A (Control-Z) in
ISO-8859-1. When upconverting to Unicode, if an encoding has a character
which cannot be converted into Unicode, that sequence is replaced by the
Unicode substitution character (U+FFFD).
The conversion failure behavior can be customized:
- perform substitution as described above with a custom substitution
character
- skip any invalid characters
- stop the conversion, raise an error, and return partial conversion
results
- replace the missing character with a diagnostic character and continue,
e.g. [U+hhhh]
There are two INI settings that control this.
unicode.from_error_mode = U_INVALID_SUBSTITUTE
U_INVALID_SKIP
U_INVALID_STOP
U_INVALID_ESCAPE
unicode.from_error_subst_char = a2
The second setting is supposed to contain the Unicode code point value for
the substitution character. This value has to be representable in the target
encoding.
Note that PHP always tries to convert as much as of the data as possible and
returns the converted results even if an error happens.
Unicode Switch
==============
Obviously, PHP cannot simply impose new Unicode support on everyone. There
are many applications that do not care about Unicode and do not need it.
Consequently, there is a switch that enables certain fundamental language
changes related to Unicode. This switch is available as a site-wide, or
per-dir INI setting only.
Note that having switch turned off does not imply that PHP is unaware of
Unicode at all and that no Unicode string can exist. It only affects certain
aspects of the language, and Unicode strings can always be created
programmatically.
unicode_semantics = On
[TODO: list areas that are affected by this switch]
Unicode String Type
===================
Unicode string type (IS_UNICODE) is supposed to contain text data encoded in
UTF-16 format. It is the main string type in PHP when Unicode semantics
switch is turned on. Unicode strings can exist when the switch is off, but
they have to be produced programmatically, via calls to functions that
return Unicode type.
The operational unit when working with Unicode strings is a code point, not
code unit or byte. One code point in UTF-16 may be comprised of 1 or 2 code
units, each of which is a 16-bit word. Working on the code point level is
necessary because doing otherwise would mean offloading the processing of
surrogate pairs onto PHP users, and that is less than desirable.
The repercussions are that one cannot expect code point N to be at offset
N in the Unicode string. Instead, one has to iterate from the beginning from
the string using U16_FWD() macro until the desired codepoint is reached.
The codepoint access is one of the primary areas targeted for optimization.
Native Encoding String Type
===========================
Native encoding string type (IS_STRING) serves two purposes: backwards
compatibility when Unicode semantics switch is off, and for representing
strings in non-Unicode encodings (native encodings) when it is on. It is
processsed on the byte level.
Binary String Type
==================
Binary string type (IS_BINARY) can be used for storing images, PDFs, or
other binary data intended to be processed on a byte-level and that cannot
be intepreted as text.
Binary data type does not participate in implicit conversions, and cannot be
explicitly upconverted to other string types, although the inverse is
possible.
Printing binary data to the standard output passes it through as-is,
independent of the output encoding.
When Unicode semantics switch is off, binary string literals and binary
strings returned by functions actually resolve to IS_STRING type, for
backwards compatibility reasons.
Zval Structure Changes
======================
PHP is a type-agnostic language. Its data values are encapsulated in a zval
(Zend value) structure that can change as necessary to accomodate various types.
struct _zval_struct {
/* Variable information */
union {
long lval; /* long value */
double dval; /* double value */
struct {
char *val;
int len;
} str; /* string value */
HashTable *ht; /* hash table value */
zend_object_value obj; /* object value */
} value;
zend_uint refcount;
zend_uchar type; /* active type */
zend_uchar is_ref;
};
The type field determines what is stored in the union, IS_STRING being the only
data type pertinent to this discussion. In the current version, the strings
are binary-safe, but, for all intents and purposes, are assumed to be
comprised of 8-bit characters. It is possible to treat the string value as
an opaque type containing arbitrary binary data, and in fact that is how
mbstring extension uses it, in order to store multibyte strings. However,
many extensions and the Zend engine itself manipulate the string value
directly without regard to its internals. Needless to say, this can lead to
problems.
For IS_UNICODE type, we need to add another structure to the union:
union {
....
struct {
UChar *val; /* Unicode string value */
int32_t len; /* number of UChar's */
....
} value;
This cleanly separates the two types of strings and helps preserve backwards
compatibility. For IS_BINARY type, we can re-use the str union.
Language Modifications
======================
If a Unicode switch is turned on, PHP string literals - single-quoted,
double-quoted, and heredocs - become Unicode strings (IS_UNICODE type).
They support all the same escape sequences and variable interpolations as
previously, with the addition of some new escape sequences.
The contents of the strings are interpreted as follows:
- all non-escaped characters are interpreted as a corresponding Unicode
codepoint based on the current script encoding, e.g. ASCII 'a' (0x51) =>
U+0061, Shift-JIS (0x92 0x69) => U+4E2D
- existing PHP escape sequences are also interpreted as Unicode codepoints,
including \xXX (hex) and \OOO (octal) numbers, e.g. "\x20" => U+0020
- two new escape sequences, \uXXXX and \UXXXXXX are interpreted as a 4 or
6-hex Unicode codepoint value, e.g. \u0221 => U+0221, \U010410 =>
U+10410
- a new escape sequence allows specifying a character by its full
Unicode name, e.g. \C{THAI CHARACTER PHO SAMPHAO} => U+0E20
The single-quoted string is more restrictive than the other two types: so
far the only escape sequence allowed inside of it was \', which specifies
a literal single quote. However, single quoted strings now support the new
Unicode character escape sequences as well.
PHP allows variable interpolation inside the double-quoted and heredoc strings.
However, the parser separates the string into literal and variable chunks during
compilation, e.g. "abc $var def" -> "abc" . $var . "def". This means that the
literal chunks can be handled in the normal way for as far as Unicode
support is concerned.
Since all string literals become Unicode by default, one loses the ability
to specify byte-oriented or binary strings. In order to create binary string
literals, a new syntax is necessary: prefixing a string literal with letter
'b' creates a binary string.
$var = b'abc\001';
$var = b"abc\001";
$var = b<<<EOD
abc\001
EOD;
The binary string literals support the same escape sequences as the current
PHP strings. If the Unicode switch is turned off, then the binary string
literals generate normal string (IS_STRING) type internally, without any
effect on the application.
The string operators have been changed to accomodate the new IS_UNICODE and
IS_BINARY types. In more detail:
- The concatenation (.) operator has been changed to automatically coerce
IS_STRING type to the more precise IS_UNICODE if its operands are of two
different string types. It does not perform coersion for IS_BINARY type,
however, since binary data is not considered to be in any encoding. To
concatenate string with binary data, strings have to be cast to binary
type first. The coersion uses the conversion matrix specified later in
this document.
- The concatenation assignment operator (.=) has been changed similarly.
- The string indexing operators {}/[] have been changed to accomodate
IS_UNICODE type strings and extract the specified character. Note that
the index specifies a code point, not a byte, or a code unit, thus
supporting supplementary characters as well.
- Both Unicode and binary string types can be used as array keys. If the
Unicode switch is on, the native encoding strings are converted to
Unicode, if they are used as hash keys, but binary strings are not.
Note that this means if Unicode switch is off, then Unicode string "abc"
and native string "abc" do not hash to the same value.
- Bitwise operators and increment/decrement operators do not work on
Unicode strings. They do work on binary strings.
- Two new casting operators are introduced, (unicode) and (binary).
They use the conversion matrix specified later in this document.
- The comparison operators when applied to Unicode strings, perform
comparison in binary code point order. They also do appropriate coersion
if the strings are of differing types.
- The arithmetic operators use the same semantic as today for converting
strings to numbers. A Unicode string is considered numeric if it
represents a long or a double number in en_US_POSIX locale.
Inline HTML
===========
Because inline HTML blocks are intermixed with PHP ones, they are also
written in the script encoding. PHP transcodes the HTML blocks to the output
encoding as needed, resulting in direct passthrough if the script encoding
matches output encoding.
Identifiers
===========
Considering that scripts may be written in various encodings, we do not
restrict identifiers to be ASCII-only. PHP allows any valid identifier based
on the Unicode Standard Annex #31. The identifiers are case folded when
necessary (class and function names) and converted to normalization form
NFKC, so that two identifiers written in two compatible ways refer to the
same thing.
Numbers
=======
Unlike identifiers, we restrict numbers to consist only of ASCII digits and
do not interpret them as written in a specific locale. The numbers are
expected to adhere to en_US_POSIX or C locale, i.e. having no thousands
separator and fractional separator being (.) "full stop". Numeric strings
are supposed to adhere to the same rules, i.e. "10,3" is not interpreted as
a number even if the current locale's fractional separator is comma.
Parameter Parsing API Modifications
===================================
Internal PHP functions largely uses zend_parse_parameters() API in order to
obtain the parameters passed to them by the user. For example:
char *str;
int len;
if (zend_parse_parameters(ZEND_NUM_ARGS() TSRMLS_CC, "s", &str, &len) == FAILURE) {
return;
}
This forces the input parameter to be a string, and its value and length are
stored in the variables specified by the caller.
There are now three new specifiers: 't', 'u', and 'T'.
't' specifier
-------------
This specifier indicates that the caller requires the incoming parameter
to be string data (IS_STRING, IS_UNICODE, IS_BINARY). The caller has to provide
the storage for string value, length, and type.
void *str;
int len;
zend_uchar type;
if (zend_parse_parameters(ZEND_NUM_ARGS() TSRMLS_CC, "t", &str, &len, &type) == FAILURE) {
return;
}
if (type == IS_UNICODE) {
/* process UTF-16 data */
} else {
/* process native string or binary data */
}
For IS_STRING and IS_BINARY types, the length represents the number of
bytes, and for IS_UNICODE the number of UChar's. When converting other
types (numbers, booleans, etc) to strings, the exact behavior depends on
the Unicode semantics switch: if on, they are converted to IS_UNICODE,
otherwise to IS_STRING.
'u' specifier
-------------
This specifier indicates that the caller requires the incoming parameter
to be a Unicode UTF-16 encoded string. If a non-Unicode string is passed,
the engine creates a copy of the string and automatically convert it
to Unicode type before passing it to the internal function. No such
conversion is necessary for Unicode strings, obviously. Binary type cannot
be upconverted, and the engine issues an error in such case.
UChar *str;
int32_t len;
if (zend_parse_parameters(ZEND_NUM_ARGS() TSRMLS_CC, "u", &str, &len) == FAILURE) {
return;
}
/* process UTF-16 data */
'T' specifier
-------------
This specifier is useful when the function takes two or more strings and
operates on them. Using 't' specifier for each one would be somewhat
problematic if the passed-in strings are of mixed types, and multiple
checks need to be performed in order to do anything. All parameters
marked by the 'T' specifier are promoted to the same type.
Binary type is generally speaking the most precise one. However, we do not
want to convert Unicode strings to binary ones, so an error is thrown
if the incoming list of parameters has both Unicode and binary strings in
it.
If there are no binary strings, and at least one of the strings is of
Unicode type, then all the rest of the strings are upconverted to Unicode.
Otherwise the promotion is to IS_STRING type.
void *str1, *str2;
int len1, len2;
zend_uchar type1, type2;
if (zend_parse_parameters(ZEND_NUM_ARGS() TSRMLS_CC, "TT", &str1, &len1,
&type1, &str2, &len2, &type2) == FAILURE) {
return;
}
if (type1 == IS_UNICODE) {
/* process as Unicode, str2 is guaranteed to be Unicode as well */
} else {
/* process as native string, str2 is guaranteed to be the same */
}
The existing 's' specifier has been modified as well. If a Unicode string is
passed in, it automatically copies and converts the string to the runtime
encoding, and issues a warning. If a binary type is passed-in, no conversion
is necessary.
Upgrading Existing Functions
============================
Upgrading functions to work with new data types will be a deliberate and
involved process, because one needs to consider not only the mechanisms for
processing Unicode characters, for example, but also the semantics of
the function.
The main tenet of the upgrade process should be that when processing Unicode
strings, the unit of operation is a code point, not a code unit or a byte.
For example, strlen() returns the number of code points in the string.
strlen('abc') = 3
strlen('ab\U010000') = 3
strlen('ab\uD800\uDC00') = 3 /* not 4 */
Function upgrade guidelines are available in a separate document.
Unicode Extension
=================
There will be one or more extensions that provide Unicode and i18n services
to PHP. In phase I only the conversion service is necessary. The Unicode
extension is 'ext/unicode' and its functions should be prefixed with 'unicode'
or 'icu'.
Conversion Functions
--------------------
string unicode_encode(unicode $input, text $encoding)
Takes a UTF-16 Unicode string and converts it to the the target
encoding, returning the result.
unicode unicode_decode(string $input, text $encoding)
Takes a string in the source encoding and converts it to a UTF-16
Unicode string, returning the result.
Type Conversion Matrix
======================
to | IS_STRING | IS_UNICODE | IS_BINARY
from | | |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
| | |
IS_STRING | n/a | implicit=yes | explicit=yes
| | explicit=yes | implicit=no
| | |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
| | |
IS_UNICODE | explicit=yes | n/a | explicit=yes
| implicit=no | | implicit=no
| | |
------------------------------|------------------------------------
| | |
IS_BINARY | explicit=no | explicit=no | n/a
| implicit=no | implicit=no |
| | |
explicit = casting
implicit = for concatenation, etc
IS_STRING <-> IS_UNICODE uses runtime-encoding
IS_UNICODE -> IS_BINARY converts to runtime encoding first, then to binary
Implementation Details That Need Expanding
==========================================
- Streams support for Unicode - What stream filters will we be providing?
- Conversion errors behavior - Need to define the default.
- INI files encoding - Do we support BOMs?
- There are likely to be other issues which are missing from this document
Build System
============
Unicode support in PHP is always enabled. The only configuration option
during development should be the location of the ICU headers and libraries.
--with-icu-dir=<dir> <dir> parameter specifies the location of ICU
header and library files.
After the initial development we have to repackage ICU library for our needs
and bundle it with PHP.
Document History
================
0.5: Updated per latest discussions. Removed tentative language in several
places, since we have decided on everything described here already.
Clarified details according to Phase II progress.
0.4: Updated to include all the latest discussions. Updated development
phases.
0.3: Updated to include all the latest discussions.
0.2: Updated Phase I design proposal per discussion on unicode@php.net.
Modified Internal Encoding section to contain only UTF-16 info..
Expanded Script Encoding section.
Added Binary Data Type section.
Amended Language Modifications section to describe string literals
behavior.
Amended Build System section.
0.1: Phase I design proposal
References
==========
Unicode
http://www.unicode.org
Unicode Glossary
http://www.unicode.org/glossary/
UTF-8
http://www.utf-8.com/
UTF-16
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2781.txt
ICU Homepage
http://www.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/
ICU User Guide and API Reference
http://icu.sourceforge.net/
Unicode Annex #31
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr31/
PHP Parameter Parsing API
http://www.php.net/manual/en/zend.arguments.retrieval.php
Authors
=======
Andrei Zmievski <andrei@gravitonic.com>
vim: set et :
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