"phpBB 3.1" > "Features" > "Unicode Enhancements"
Ticket: http://tracker.phpbb.com/browse/PHPBB3-9668
Several enhancements to unicode handling. Automatic and native normalization.
Currently any call to request_var with multibyte characters requires a manual call to utf8_normalize_nfc. This, even though you have to tell request_var that the content can contain UTF-8 characters. This makes the whole API more complicated than needed. By doing normalization from within request_var this can be simplified.
The old syntax for reading UTF-8 data from the request parameters was:
$input = utf8_normalize_nfc(request_var('input', '', true));
The new API is:
$input = request_var('input', '', true);
Because UTF-8 normalization is idempotent (http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Design_Goals), the change is fully backwards-compatible.
Normalization is applied from within request_var, which means it doesn't have to be explicitly called from outside anymore.
- Igor Wiedler
This page focuses mostly on the automatic normalization. There are also other unicode enhancements included in the patch.
PHP 5.3.0 includes the intl extension which contains a native normalizer (http://php.net/manual/en/normalizer.normalize.php). This can lead to great performance boosts compared to the PHP implementation. If available, phpBB will use the native normalizer.