[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #55603: PHP 8.2: address deprecation of the utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() functions

[WordPress Trac]

#55603: PHP 8.2: address deprecation of the utf8_encode() and utf8_decode()
functions
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 Reporter:  jrf                                  |       Owner:
                                                 |  SergeyBiryukov
     Type:  task (blessed)                       |      Status:  accepted
 Priority:  normal                               |   Milestone:  6.6
Component:  General                              |     Version:  6.0
 Severity:  normal                               |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  2nd-opinion php82 dev-feedback has-  |     Focuses:  coding-
  patch has-unit-tests                           |  standards
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Comment (by peterwilsoncc):

 Replying to [comment:82 knutsp]:
 > I'm not sure what requires mean, will an installation or upgrade be
 refused/fail, or will it just be a notice or test in Site Health?

 An upgrade will be refused: during the upgrade process support is tested
 and if the module is not included the upgrade will not proceed.

 For sites running 6.1 or later, the available modules are sent to the
 upgrade API so it can be modified not to present the upgrade to sites
 without the module installed. Such sites would only be offered minor
 version updates.

 As Dion mentions in [comment:55 comment #55], although it's ''only'' 0.5%
 of sites that don't have the module installed, at WordPress's scale that
 represents a lot of sites.


 > En elegant solution would be to not allow non English installation or
 language addition in case `mbstring` is not included. That may require a
 kind of polyfill as a short circuit and avoid fatal errors, in case non
 Latin characters are introduced by user input.

 I unsure about this, but may be convinced. It's possible that this would
 complicate matters further than the current practice of testing if multi-
 byte functions exist before using them.

 > I'm all for requiring `mbstring` in general, as we who are using
 European languages have extra characters in our alphabets, but I'm a bit
 worried about this getting accepted by project leadership in time this is
 needed for PHP versions support. And I admit that a very large portion of
 WordPress installations use a variant of English only, not only as the
 site language, but also for all users, and really don't need this.

 It's one of those stats that can be interpreted either way.

 According to the [https://wordpress.org/about/stats/ WordPress stats]
 about half of sites use an English variant (US, UK, etc) and about half
 use a non-English language.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/55603#comment:83>
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