[TYPO3-v4] Moving from UTF-8 as default to UTF-8 only in 4.6?

[Michael Stucki]

Hi Helmut,

> I'd like to suggest to drop all support for other character encodings
> besides UTF-8 in TYPO3 4.6, at least for internal processing.

We did deprecate forceCharset in 4.5 so it cannot be removed before 4.7.
But in general, I agree with you about the idea.

> While we moved to have UTF-8 as a default, in theory you could still
> switch to other encodings in TYPO3 4.5. I do not see a benefit in having
> this possibility, but there are several drawbacks.

Before we go any further from here, we still need to provide a tool for 
migrating existing tables to UTF-8. Jigal started with a tool for this 
and I plan to improve it a little more so it can deal with both "utf8 in 
latin1" and also "latin1 in latin1" data. (Remember this special 
scenario which is probably very TYPO3 specific due the forceCharset 
feature...)

> For backend rendering, data storage in the database and frontend
> rendering there's no point in using other encodings.

Correct.

> The only usecase for other encodings could be sending mails, but still
> converting to other encodings should then be the last step. All internal
> handling of strings should be done in UTF-8 (like MySQL does AFAIK).

Yeah. The whole charset handling feature set must remain because you may 
still have to import data from non-UTF-8 resources, or you want to 
output an email in latin1 explicitely.

The ability to use that will not restrict anyone for using UTF-8 by 
default. Also, I see no advantage in removing those features. Do you?

- michael
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