I've just install the last version of PHP6 dev and I've decided to test the famous new feature, the PHP Unicode Support. I will not explain new things about PHP6 or Unicode or TextIterator, it's just my discoveries test on this features.

He steps through the process he followed - enabling Unicode support, testing various output methods (including just an echo and using the TextIterator) as well as some of the manipulation methods (next/first/current) that can be used to get certain characters out of a string.

So I've got this string (in PHP) and I need to scan through it character by character. I can't scan byte by byte because it's 2007, our users write in all sorts of languages, and the string is UTF-8.

To remedy the situation, he falls back on an old standby - the mb_* functions, mb_substr and mb_strlen. His benchmarks show that, with a 1500 character string, running his sample script gives him around 61 scans per second. (The PHP6 version with TextIterator works much faster, though - 450 scans per second).

I have been working on the Unicode support in PHP for quite a while now and I figure that it is time to start talking about Unicode and I18N in general and specifically about some of the new features that PHP 6 will be bringing to the table.

He first covers the new TextIterator class, as "swiss-army kife-like" tool that gives the user abilities to work with text units (really their boundaries) in a simple, normalized way. Of course, definitions and code follow to illustrate the point with examples ranging from interpreting a string out to grabbing certain bits of the string.

He also introduces the opposite twin of the TextIterator class - ReverseTextIterator. It's basic function is to (basically) do everything its twin does, only in reverse.