PHP - Multibyte Safe Regular Expression Support

PHP supports regular expressions in three ways :

• POSIX ERE , now removed in PHP 7+
• PCRE , which is the main component , but not always a multibyte safe
• Multibyte String which is not enabled by default

There is Unicode on the Internet today , and PHP has also since 5.6 because of i18n . While PHP itself is known to be terribly poor at Unicode support, Intl provides access to the released ICU library .

To avoid long wait for UString and repetition (and memory) when doin 'it right , I prefer Intl and don't leave iconv , Multibyte String along with DateTime and rewrite most of the SBCS string functions to be multibyte. Some problems arise in this process:

• Formatting large numbers in a local language is problematic on 32-bit platforms (like NAS) when the database offers storage for 64-bit numbers. This can be solved by using numbers as a string via BCMath .
• Inside the shell, there is no support for regular expression functions the ICU , the Unicode version of PCRE is.

To use PCRE with Unicode syntax , PHP buit-in PCRE , for compilation and configuration with Unicode support. On some systems it is not configured with Unicode by adding (*UTF8)

before the expression overrides the configuration.

• Am I missing a way to work with ICU regex functions from PHP?
• Are there any other errors to consider for Unicode PCRE?
• Am I missing the reason why should I use Multibyte String?