Zaemis

In preparation for a presentation I’m giving at this month’s Syracuse PHP Users Group meeting, I found the need to read in Unicode characters in PHP one at a time. Unicode is still second-class in PHP; PHP6 failed and we have to fallback to extensions like the mbstring extension and/or libraries like Portable UTF-8 . And even with those, I didn’t see a unicode-capable fgetc() so I wrote my own. Years ago, I wrote a post describing how to read Unicode characters in C , so the logic was already familiar. As a refresher, UTF-8 is a multi-byte encoding scheme capable of representing over 2 million characters using 4 bytes or less. The first 128 characters are encoded the same as 7-bit ASCII with 0 as the most-significant bit. The other characters are encoded using multiple bytes, each byte with 1 as the most-significant bit. The bit pattern in the first byte of a multi-byte sequence tells us how many bytes are needed to represent the character. Here’s what the function looks like: f...