[php-maint] Bug#612364: php5: get_browser() inserts special characters without respecting encoding

[Jeremy]

Package: php5
Version: 5.3.3-7
Severity: minor
Tags: upstream


A change ocurred in the get_browser() function between PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 which 
in my view represents a BC break. The get_browser() function now inserts a
special character (U+00A7, "Section marker") at the beginning and end of the
browser_name_regex property of the returned object/array.  The issue with this 
is that the special character is encoded in ISO-8859-1 regardless of what encoding
was requested either via header() or default_charset.  This results in not only
improper output (if the results of get_browser() are sent to the output) but alsoo
disasterous failure if attempting to interoperate with UTF-8 services -- 
for example a database using UTF-8 encoding.

I am guessing that the reason for the introduction of this character was to allow
the browser_name_regex string to have delimiters so that it could be used directly
in preg_match() or similar, and the strange delimiter was chosen to minimize the
chance of collision with the pattern.  However, introducing special characters
in a particular encoding in PHP functions that ought to be returning ASCII strings
only seems unwise.

It's possible that the encoding problem itself was introduced in Debian, but I do
see the special character in the vanilla source distribution of PHP so it seems 
this "feature" was introduced upstream (marked as such).

Jeremy



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages php5 depends on:
ii  libapache2-mod-php5           5.3.3-7    server-side, HTML-embedded scripti
ii  php5-common                   5.3.3-7    Common files for packages built fr

php5 recommends no packages.

php5 suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information