PHPEverywhere</a. has a new posting on a topic that, I'm sure, has frustrated a number of developers - the lack of support for Unicode in PHP. So, Joey Splosky took it upon himself to write a lengthy article talking about what every developer must know about Unicode - but that still doesn't answer the question of how to get Unicode working in PHP.

Well Scott Reynen had the solution and wrote How to develop multilingual, Unicode applications with PHP in response to Joel's frustration. Scott's technique works on all versions of PHP. Or you can just use the UTF8 character set and mbstring functions, which should run faster as they are coded in C. To use mbstring, you need PHP 4.3 or later (it was buggy pre-4.3). On Unix, you will need to compile the extension in. On Windows, you just need to modify your php.ini.

Unicode support is one of those features that, if you don't need it, you'll never miss it - but when you do, you'll be glad for posts like this to help you through it.