On Oct 18, 2006, at 6:27 PM, Gavin Vess wrote:
> The original intent was to purposely define Zend_Locale_Utf8 as the
> empty set of functions, and only add when absolutely required and
> justified, per the criteria mentioned previously. It seems that
> iconv already provides the three of the functions most probably
> needed (strlen, strpos, substr).
str_replace can also be easily implemented by using iconv_strpos and
iconv_substr. I don't think that such a function should live in
Zend_Locale_Utf8 though, as it would be character set-agnostic. It
would probably be best to have it as a static utility method in
Zend_Locale.
> However, there remains the possibility of a different component, a
> more general purpose Zend_Utf8 that might live in the Laboratory,
> if someone wishes to revive the original proposal.
I am working on some layout classes for Zend_Pdf that will handle
things like wrapping long lines of text, text alignment, font size
and style changes on a single line, etc. The implementation of these
classes will require a Unicode-based backing store for the strings.
In the current (half-done) implementation, I've created a
Zend_Pdf_Text class along with several Unicode services helper
classes. The Zend_Pdf_Text class stores an arbitrary amount of
Unicode text, accepting source strings in any encoding. There is a
subclass which allows attributes such as font, size, color,
alignment, etc. to be placed on the string. The helper classes
provide important character attributes from the UCD such as line
break classes, text direction (left-to-right or right-to-left)
classes, and bidi (bi-directional text) mirrored characters, which
are required to properly lay out strings on the PDF page.
After watching the discussion here and looking more closely at
André's implementation of Zend_Locale_UTF8, I think these classes
would be more useful at a higher level:
Zend_String
--------------------
General-purpose Unicode string storage class. Would contain most of
the string manipulation functions André has already implemented in
Zend_Locale_Utf8 and whatever else from my Zend_Pdf_Text that would
be useful. Strings objects are constructed from ordinary PHP strings
using any character encoding supported by iconv.
Zend_String_Attributed
--------------------
Extends Zend_String allowing attributes to be set on ranges of
characters such as font size, color, alignment, etc. as well as any
other user-defined attributes. Zend_String_Attributed objects would
be used for advanced layout in Zend_Pdf. An attributed string class
would also pave the way for RTF and Microsoft Word document generation.
Zend_Range
--------------------
Primitive range class, used by Zend_String_Attributed for setting
character ranges. Has convenience functions to calculate unions,
intersections, etc.
Zend_Unicode
--------------------
Static helper class which vends interesting information from the
Unicode Character Database (UCD) such as character classes (i.e. - is
the character numeric?), line break classes (for PDF layout), etc.
This data comes from specialized Zend_Unicode_* objects which are
loaded on-demand.
While PHP 6 will provide native support for Unicode strings, that
release is still pretty far off (there is a lot of work remaining:
http://www.php.net/~scoates/unicode/render_func_data.php). In
addition, I don't think there are any plans for an attributed string
class or utility functions that return data from the UCD.
More importantly, Unicode string support in PHP 6 will be enabled via
an INI switch. It will be hard enough to get web hosting providers to
offer PHP 6 at all. Fear of breaking their favorite control panel
software or some esoteric extension they're using might mean getting
native Unicode support will be next to impossible.
For these reasons, and for those applications that might need to
interact with Unicode strings even in PHP 6, but with the native
Unicode support disabled, I feel strongly that such classes are
useful. I'd be happy to help lead this effort as I have an immediate
need for this capability (in Zend_Pdf).
--
Willie Alberty, Owner
Spenlen Media
[hidden email]
http://www.spenlen.com/
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