path: root/README.UNICODE

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. Text processing will
generally perform better if the characters are in Normalization Form C.


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)

    + 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.


Unicode Semantics 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 only as a site-wide (per
virtual server) INI setting.

Note that having switch turned off does not imply that PHP is unaware of Unicode
at all and that no Unicode strings can exist. It only affects certain aspects of
the language, and Unicode strings can always be created programmatically. All
the functions and operators will still support Unicode strings and work
appropriately.

    unicode.semantics = On


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.

  unicode.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 explicit (casting) and implicit (concatenation,
comparison, parameter passing) type coersions. This setting specifies the
runtime encoding.

  unicode.runtime_encoding = "iso-8859-1"


Output Encoding
===============

Automatic output encoding conversion is supported on the standard output
stream.  Therefore, commands 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 features

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. If the output encoding is set, PHP will automatically add 'charset'
portion to the Conten-Type header.

  unicode.output_encoding = "utf-8"


HTTP Input Encoding
===================

There will be no explicit input encoding setting. Instead, PHP will rely on a
couple of heuristics to determine what encoding the incoming request might be
in. Firstly, PHP will attempt to decode the input using the value of the
unicode.output_encoding setting, because that is the most logical choice if we
assume that the clients send the data back in the encoding that the page with
the form was in. If that is unsuccessful, we could fallback on the "_charset_"
form parameter, if present. This parameter is sent by IE (and possibly Firefox)
along with the form data and indicates the encoding of the request. Note that
this parameter will be present only if the form contains a hidden field named
"_charset_".

The variables that are decoded successfully will be put into the request arrays
as Unicode strings, those that fail -- as binary strings. PHP will set a
flag (probably in the $_SERVER array) indicating that there were problems during
the conversion. The user will have access to the raw input in case of
failure via the input filter extension and can to access the request parameters
via input_get_arg() function. The input filter extension always looks in
the raw input data and not in the request arrays, and input_get_arg() has a
'charset' parameter that can be specified to tell PHP what charset the incoming
data is in. This kills two birds with one stone: users have access to request
arrays data on successful decoding as well as a standard and secure way to get
at the data in case of failed decoding.


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, 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:
   unicode.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 error behavior can be customized:

  - stop the conversion and return an empty string
  - skip any invalid characters
  - substibute invalid characters with a custom substitution character
  - escape the invalid character in various formats

The global conversion error settings can be controlled with these two functions:

  unicode_set_error_mode(int direction, int mode)
  unicode_set_subst_char(unicode char)

Where direction is either FROM_UNICODE or TO_UNICODE, and mode is one of these
constants:

  U_CONV_ERROR_STOP
  U_CONV_ERROR_SKIP 
  U_CONV_ERROR_SUBST
  U_CONV_ERROR_ESCAPE_UNICODE
  U_CONV_ERROR_ESCAPE_ICU
  U_CONV_ERROR_ESCAPE_JAVA
  U_CONV_ERROR_ESCAPE_XML_DEC
  U_CONV_ERROR_ESCAPE_XML_HEX

Substitution character can be set only for FROM_UNICODE direction and has to
exist in the target character set.


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. This will
be transparent to the end user who will work only with "character" offsets.

The codepoint access is one of the primary areas targeted for optimization.


Binary String Type
==================

Binary string type (IS_STRING) serves two purposes: backwards compatibility and
representing non-Unicode strings and binary data. When Unicode semantics switch
is off, it is used for all strings in PHP, same in previous versions. When the
switch is on, this type will be used to store text in other encodings as well as
true binary data such as images, PDFs, etc.

Printing binary data to the standard output passes it through as-is, independent
of the output encoding.


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 */
            int len;               /* number of UChar's */
        } ustr;
    ....
    } value;

This cleanly separates the two types of strings and helps preserve backwards
compatibility.

To optimize access to IS_STRING and IS_UNICODE storage at runtime, we need yet
another structure:

    union {
    ....
        struct {                    /* Universal string type */
            zstr val;
            int len;
        } uni;
    ....
    } value;

Where zstr ia union of char*, UChar*, and void*.


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.

  - The concatenation assignment operator (.=) has been changed similarly.

  - The string indexing operator [] has 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.

  - Both Unicode and binary string types can be used as array keys. If the
    Unicode switch is on, the binary keys are converted to Unicode.

  - 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). The
    (string) operator will cast to Unicode type if the Unicode semantics switch is
    on, and to binary type otherwise.

  - 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 semantics 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 five new specifiers: 'u', 't', 'T', 'U', and 'S'.

  't' specifier
  -------------
  This specifier indicates that the caller requires the incoming parameter to be
  string data (IS_STRING, IS_UNICODE). 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 Unicode string */
    } else {
       /* process binary string */
    }

  For IS_STRING type, 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 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.

    UChar *str;
    int len;

    if (zend_parse_parameters(ZEND_NUM_ARGS() TSRMLS_CC, "u", &str, &len) == FAILURE) {
        return;
    }
    /* process Unicode string */

    
  '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.
  
  If at least one of the 'T' parameters is of Unicode type, then the rest of
  them are converted to IS_UNICODE. Otherwise all 'T' parameters are conveted 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 binary 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.

The 'U' and 'S' specifiers are similar to 'u' and 's' but they are more strict
about the type of the passed-in parameter. If 'U' is specified and the binary
string is passed in, the engine will issue a warning instead of doing automatic
conversion. The converse applies to the 'S' specifier.


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.


Document TODO
==========================================
- Streams support for Unicode - What stream filters will be provided?
- User conversion error handler
- INI files encoding - UTF-8? 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
================
  0.6: Remove notion of native encoding string, only 2 string types are used
       now. Update conversion error behavior section and parameter parsing.
       Bring the document up-to-date with reality in general.

  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 :