Edit report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47494&edit=1
ID: 47494 Comment by: trueleader at gmx dot de Reported by: philipp dot feigl at gmail dot com Summary: htmlspecialchars does not throw E_WARNING on multibyte problems Status: Bogus Type: Bug Package: Strings related Operating System: CentOS5 PHP Version: 5.2.8 New Comment: Why the developer of the language create a workaround for bad configured servers and/or applications? If a configuration variable tells that errors are shown on screen then I think all errors (dependent on reporting level) are shown - and not that they can be only logged if the configuration variable is turned off. I think/hope this is not only my opinion. We just lost some data, because we fill a JS confirm message on a HTML click event with a string from a PHP language variable. Nobody knows that we missed to utf8_encode because all developers use display_errors on and therefor no error is shown/logged for this problem Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2009-11-20 20:24:21] s...@php.net The idea is to return an error but not display it (i.e. log it or allow custom error handlers to process it). The reason for it is that, unfortunately, people run servers in production with display_errors=On, and php_escape_html_entities_ex can be triggered from all kinds of code that usually doesn't produce errors, which can reveal sensitive information on public sites. So we chose to go after lesser of two evils and not generate the error in this context. For debugging, I would suggest always logging errors and checking the error log, as some errors may be hard to spot in display anyway (especially true if your script produces something like JSON). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2009-02-25 13:48:11] j...@php.net It's intentional. If you disagree, please ask s...@php.net why it is like this (I once reverted that :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2009-02-24 13:57:32] philipp dot feigl at gmail dot com Description: ------------ When using htmlspecialchars with a invalid multibyte string and using UTF-8 as encoding, there are two possible outcomes based on the "display_errors" ini setting: 1. display_errors=1 => empty string is returned 2. display_errors=0 => E_WARNING is thrown This is exactly what the code states. Can be viewed in http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/php-src/ext/standard/html.c?view=markup on line 1147 However this is VERY confusing as a developer point of view. As I have display_errors always set to "1" for debugging purposes, I never realized, one of our locale strings was corrupt, as it was just emptied out. Now in the production environment, our error handler terminates the script because of the E_WARNING beeing thrown. While both of the ways (empty string / error) are acceptable for me - because ofcourse the input string is invalid, it is very confusing to have different behaviors of PHP based on the display_errors setting. Reproduce code: --------------- echo 'a' . htmlspecialchars(substr(utf8_encode('aü'), 0, 2), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') . 'b'; Expected result: ---------------- Either 'ab' Or PHP E_WARNING However not both based on display_errors Actual result: -------------- display_errors=1 => 'ab' display_errors=0 => E_WARNING ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47494&edit=1