[Sorry I cant answer inline as there are many answers to give to many users]
Like everybody, I' absolutely against adding an "encoding" parameter
to ext/standard functions or relying on unreliable system locale.
Like Nikita says, every multibyte function should go to ext/mbstring ,
and nowhere else, please , do not turn PHP into something even more
dirty as it is nowadays :-p
I'm +1 to embed and activate mbstring by default in future PHP releases.
However, this has already been discussed (from what I remember) and I
dont remember why we ended with a "no" end-word, could we be refreshed
about this ?
I'm not in favor of magic things. Magically replacing PHP strings by
mb_ implementation is a really bad idea. We should keep the INI
parameter about this alive though (mbstring.func_overload), so that
people that explicitely want to activate such a magic can do it if
they want to.
I'm +1 also to start a "serious" (hum) discussion about multibyte/PHP6
, we've been saying this for years : we need native support of unicode
in PHP :-p The actual problem we are facing once again shows this.
Julien.P