Re: ctype_print, the British Pound and other non-ASCII characters

Bob wrote:
> I'm seeing mischief from ctype_print.
> 
> So far as I can tell, the British Pound symbol, '£' is considered a 
> printable character according to the locale I use on my Ubuntu box. But 
> even across two years, two boxes, several versions of Ubuntu (from 7.04 
> to 9.10, one x86, one AMD64), and two major versions of PHP (PHP 4 and 
> now PHP 5.2.11), I cannot get ctype_print to return true when a string 
> given to it contains the British Pound symbol. (Or other non-ASCII 
> characters such as ø or ß.)
> 
> The locale I'm using is en_GB.UTF-8 and when I call setlocale(LC_ALL, 
> 'en_GB.UTF-8') in PHP, it returns the name of this locale rather than 
> FALSE, so that seems to be in order. (However, to be sure I have 
> installed and reinstalled the language pack in Ubuntu as suggested by 
> others.)
> 
> I've even read through the en_GB and i18n locale definition files to 
> confirm that <U00A3> (for the British Pound symbol) does appear within 
> the print and graph sections, so both ctype_print and ctype_graph should 
> consider it acceptable.
> 
> What's most maddening is that ctype_print does return true on my shared 
> hosting server, so I know that it can be achieved. I'm just hoping that 
> someone here can tell me what I'm doing wrong, or what my operating 
> system is doing wrong.
> 
> For your information, I'm currently running the following:
> 
> Ubuntu 9.10 (AMD64)
> Apache 2.2.14
> PHP 5.2.11 running as a CGI (to mirror the config of my shared host)
> Locale in use: en_GB.UTF-8
> LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
> 
> Can anyone tell me how to get ctype_print to behave?

Tested on a few ubuntu boxes (8&9s) and:

When using en_US.utf8 all is fine

var_dump( ctype_print( 'abcd ef £ ghs als kl ,!' ) ); // TRUE

then:

# locale-gen en_GB.UTF-8
Generating locales...
  en_GB.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

# locale -a
C
en_GB.utf8
en_US
en_US.utf8
POSIX

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_GB.UTF-8');
var_dump( ctype_print( 'abcd ef £ ghs als kl ,!' ) ); // FALSE

wondering if this is a PHP issue or a mapping generation issue on ubuntu..

have you checked the output of #locale to ensure LC_CTYPE is set to the
appropriate value?

regards!