NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael B Allen]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:59:55 -0400
David Krings <ramons at gmx.net> wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> Being a ucfirst issue, I want to capitalize the first letter in a 
> string. What caught my attention is this sentence in the PHP 
> documentation: "Note that 'alphabetic' is determined by the current 
> locale. For instance, in the default "C" locale characters such as 
> umlaut-a (ä) will not be converted."
> 
> Well, that is what potentially might happen. Is there a less language 
> discriminatory version of ucfirst or do I need to snip off the first 
> character and check it against ä,ö, and ü to make them Ä, Ö, and Ü? That 
> will take care of German, but what about other languages?
> 
> The locale of my system is US-English, but the script could run on other 
> locales as well. Is there any way to switch the locale on the fly? Even 
> if, I'd neet to noodle the string through ucfirst through all quite a 
> bunch of locales.

By default programs (and thus PHP scripts) run in the C locale. If you
call setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""); this will switch to the locale specified
in the environment usually throught the LANG variable. So you can test
this by running your script like:

$ LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 ./myscript.php

> This is "bupid" how my 2 year old would put it.

Much of PHP is derived from the the C language standards. Because C is a
machine language abstraction, it is deliberately coarse about things that
different systems may or may not support (e.g. i18n). This is contrary to
the top-down method of designing more modern and user friendly scripting
languages but it provides somewhat of a guarantee that there will be
no holes in the API since C is the common denominator of programming
languages.

Mike

-- 
Michael B Allen
PHP Active Directory Kerberos SSO
http://www.ioplex.com/