This is probably an old hat for PHP veterans, but little me was kind of surprised by this. After 15 years of Java related development I probably became somewhat detached to the roots: Once upon a time there were no strings, just bytes.
It seems that PHP - maybe due to some kind of misplaced nostalgia - still wants to honor these good old times. Lets take a look what happens if you innocently use umlauts:
<?php
$a = "äöü";
echo strlen($a) . '\n';
?>And the result is … well, actually I can tell you what result you will get on your system, on my system it is
6
Duh … ok, well UTF-8. So PHP strings are actually what a Java programmer would call a byte-array, and they are now implemented this way in jbj.
On a side note: Of course I am (now) aware of the correct way to handle UTF-8 strings in PHP, it is called
the mbstring extension, which ist quite standard on must systems - and probably will be a hell to reimplement
in jbj (maybe not).