Comments on: mbstring vs iconv

By: Willem

Willem — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:33:17 +0000

One difference between iconv() and mb_convert_encoding() is that iconv supports flags such as //IGNORE and //TRANSLIT, which can be used to deal with characters present in one character set but not in the other, eg.

$iso = iconv(‘UTF-8′, ‘ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT’, $utf8_string);

By: mbstring vs iconv benchmarking « Dokeos lead developer’s Weblog

mbstring vs iconv benchmarking « Dokeos lead developer’s Weblog — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 03:12:38 +0000

[...] vs iconv benchmarking Following up on my previous post about the differences between the mbstring and iconv international characters libraries (which [...]

By: ywarnier

ywarnier — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:41:51 +0000

Thanks for the e-mail. I’ll be preparing a fresh post to show the results of all this. Just so that I don’t forget, the test file can be found here:
http://mirror3.mirrors.tds.net/pub/gutenberg.org/1/3/0/8/13083/13083-utf8.txt

By: ywarnier

ywarnier — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:28:27 +0000

Mmmh, that’s great! You can send that to me at yannick dot warnier -at- dokeos dot com. It would probably result in an ugly, unreadable comment indeed, so I’ll try to see if I can put it in the post itself nicely (wordpress isn’t really *good* at code display, but still… I can fake indentation) or attach it as a file.
Don’t forget to mention under which license you are providing this bit of code (I suggest LGPL, should be free enough to do whatever one might want to do).

By: Nicola

Nicola — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:53:06 +0000

Just for fun this evening I did a little benchmarking program on the various strlen versions (strlen, mb_strlen and iconv_strlen). I was expecting something boring but the results has been quite surprising: on my PC, mb_strlen() is about 4/5 times quicker than iconv_strlen().

I applied strlen line per line on an UTF8 encoded text from Gutenberg (R.U.R., I don’t know what it is), and these are a sample of my results:

dummy_strlen 5853 (4485 lines and 0 chars)
strlen 4853 (4485 lines and 150846 chars)
mb_strlen 8574 (4485 lines and 140932 chars)
iconv_strlen 38774 (4485 lines and 140932 chars)

The dummy_strlen() is an empty callback. The times are expressed in uSeconds.

Yannick, if you give me some reference I can send you the program: I fear posting it here will result in an ugly, unreadable comment.

By: ywarnier

ywarnier — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:47:06 +0000

Actually, nothing really came out of that post. It seems it’s a general lack of knowledge, a lack of interest or a fear of starting a flame wars (although I would not tend to believe it’s the latter, considering how easily flame wars are initiated).

The thread archive can be found here:
http://lists-archives.org/php-general/330773-mbstring-vs-iconv-any-existing-benchmark.html
and as you can see, only one person replied, and didn’t give much info.

By: Nicola

Nicola — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:24:59 +0000

Care to share the results?

By: ywarnier

ywarnier — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:06:31 +0000

Interesting to know. I just sent a mail to php-general’s list to see if there’s someone there who knows more about actual benchmarks or anything useful in terms of comparison.

By: Magento Partner

Magento Partner — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:29:38 +0000

In Zend Framework and applications depending on it like Magento they prefer iconv instead of the old mbstring. Although I guess there are good reasons why Zend has choosen the “new” iconv lib, mbstring has still a lot more and helpful functions to offer.
Perhaps Zend will rely on the libiconv in feature PHP releases – just think of mb support in PHP6….