PHP and Unicode

Hooray for me! I get to look at Unicode today, as part of a second internationalization phase for Showing Evidence, an upcoming part of the Intel Thinking Tools suite. We have to modify our test server to localize some of the last few hard-coded strings in the application.

Although Intel’s server isn’t written in PHP, our test server is, so now I get to learn how to work with Unicode in that environment. Ben pointed out that PHP doesn’t, um, actually know how to deal with Unicode, so this article by Scott Reynen is going to come in handy. I will need to re-read Joel Spolsky’s “if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you…” article on the basics. Entertaining, and informative!

Scott Reynen’s weblog is pretty cool too…I like his writing style a lot. One more thing: my opening “hooray” was originally intended sarcastically, though with these two useful articles I am actually looking forward to it.