is_string()

Hello!

The past few days I've been trying to get some of our code to run on PHP 
6 with unicode semantics turned on to be able to provide some 
benchmarking. Ofcourse I found some BC breaking behavior, where the 
following one is bringing the largest WTF factor:

	<?php
        $str = "hautamaekki";
        var_dump( is_string( $str ) );
	?>

	derick@tequila:/tmp$ php-6.0dev /tmp/string-test.php
	bool(false)

(The reason for this is that is_string() now returns true for *binary* 
strings only). I prepared a patch [1] which reverts is_string() back to 
the "expected" behavior. This patch is also in line with the notes from 
the PDM [2]. Andrei argued that is_string() and (string) should work on 
binary strings and is_unicode() and (unicode) for "real" strings. 
However I think it is a much better idea to use is_binary()/(binary) and 
is_string()/(string) instead as this will not break so much code. To 
illustrate this with another example that I encountered in PHPUnit2 when 
trying to get our code running:

In Framework/TestSuite.php there is the following code (shortened):

    public function __construct($theClass = '', $name = '') {
        $argumentsValid = FALSE;

        if (is_object($theClass) &&
            $theClass instanceof ReflectionClass) {
            $argumentsValid = TRUE;
        }

        else if (is_string($theClass) && $theClass !== '' && class_exists($theClass)) {

Which is f.e. called with (ezcTestSuite inherits the PHPUnit2 TestSuit 
class):

    public static function suite()
    {
        return new ezcTestSuite( "ezcConsoleToolsInputTest" );
    }

This does not work anymore with PHP 6 as the string is now suddenly no 
string anymore... highlight confusing I would say. 

Can we please use is_binary()/(binary)  for binary string types and 
is_string()/(string) for real strings as per PDM notes?

regards,
Derick


[1] http://files.derickrethans.nl/patches/uc-is_string-2006-03-15.diff.txt
[2] http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html#different-string-types

-- 
Derick Rethans
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org