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Showing posts from June, 2015

PHP Variable Names

For years I thought PHP variable names could only be constructed from ASCII characters. Actually, maybe I had not really thought about it but rather just followed common practice without question. The common practice being something like a variable name is prefixed with $ the first character must be a letter (a-z, A-Z) or an underscore (_) subsequent characters can be any mix of letters or digits (0-9) or underscore So, examples of valid PHP variable names include $Andre   $age   $previous_total But!!!!! We are in the Unicode age and so variable names are NOT restricted to the above common practice. We can be much more creative. We can, for instance, localise our code. Examples of valid variable names include $André   $小山   $エクセレント   $우수한   $🐉 For the following explanation I am assuming your source code file is saved as Unicode UTF-8. If not, it should be. Letʼs refer to the the definitive ...

Chinese Name

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My chinese adopted name is 小山 which consists of two chinese characters. Sometime ago I was informed that there is a single chinese character that combines 小 and 山. The ideographic description character sequence is ⿱小山 This combined character is encoded in Unicode in SIP (Supplementary Ideographic Plane), CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C at codepoint U+2AA24. The only font I have, so far, found which contains a glyph for this character is hanazono which is available for download from  osdn.jp/projects/hanazono-font/releases/62072  Hanazono is actually provided as two ttf font files:  HanaMinA and HanaMinB. Here is what the combined character, which is in HanaMinB, looks like in TextEdit on OSX. Is there a sound for this uncommon character? After much searching I discovered  cns11643.gov.tw/MAIDB/query_general_view.do?page=c&code=263f  which represents the sound as shān (Hanyu Pinyin) and ㄕㄢ (Zhuyin). Same sound for both forms of representation. CNS 116...

New gTLDs CSV

There is a regularly updated ICANN csv file which summarises key New gTLD information in 6 fields. It is available at  newgtlds.icann.org/newgtlds.csv  (ref:  cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2014-September/003907.html ) field 1: ASCII form (A-label) field 2: unicode form (U-label) if an IDN otherwise empty field 3: registry operator field 4: date registry agreement signed field 5: application number field 6: date of delegation (empty if not yet delegated) Fields 1,2 (if an IDN),3,4 from this csv are incorporated into the public suffix list  publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat For example, the csv entry for .コム is xn--tckwe,コム,"VeriSign Sarl",2015-01-15,1-1254-37311, It seems as though Chrome browser uses this public suffix list. One interesting (and IMHO good) consequence is that Chrome will recognise a .コム IDN (eg anything.コム ) as a domain name to be resolved even though it is not yet delegated. Chrome does not resort to a search. So Chrome is ready...