Package: php5 Version: 5.3.3-7 Severity: minor Tags: upstream
A change ocurred in the get_browser() function between PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 which in my view represents a BC break. The get_browser() function now inserts a special character (U+00A7, "Section marker") at the beginning and end of the browser_name_regex property of the returned object/array. The issue with this is that the special character is encoded in ISO-8859-1 regardless of what encoding was requested either via header() or default_charset. This results in not only improper output (if the results of get_browser() are sent to the output) but alsoo disasterous failure if attempting to interoperate with UTF-8 services -- for example a database using UTF-8 encoding. I am guessing that the reason for the introduction of this character was to allow the browser_name_regex string to have delimiters so that it could be used directly in preg_match() or similar, and the strange delimiter was chosen to minimize the chance of collision with the pattern. However, introducing special characters in a particular encoding in PHP functions that ought to be returning ASCII strings only seems unwise. It's possible that the encoding problem itself was introduced in Debian, but I do see the special character in the vanilla source distribution of PHP so it seems this "feature" was introduced upstream (marked as such). Jeremy -- System Information: Debian Release: 6.0 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages php5 depends on: ii libapache2-mod-php5 5.3.3-7 server-side, HTML-embedded scripti ii php5-common 5.3.3-7 Common files for packages built fr php5 recommends no packages. php5 suggests no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
