Changelog - Version 7.0

Status: in development. This document tracks changes landing on the 7.0 branch. Nothing here is released yet, and the contents may still change.

Breaking Changes

• FromUTF8::toIso88591Email() was removed. It was deprecated; use toMimeEncodedWord().

• The conversions now use PHP's own functions instead of hand-maintained tables (about 2,300 lines removed). The method names and signatures are unchanged, but some outputs change:

  Method	Now	Visible change
  ToUTF8::fromHtmlEntities()	html_entity_decode(..., ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5)	Decodes every HTML5 entity, including &, <, >, " and hex ones (A), which were left as they were.   gives U+00A0 instead of a plain space. Ũ/ũ are not decoded: they are not HTML entities.
  FromUTF8::toHtmlEntities()	htmlentities() + mb_encode_numericentity()	Characters with no named entity are written as numeric ones (ũ → &#361;, ✓ → &#10003;) instead of &utilde; or ?, so the output is always ASCII. &, < and > are still left as they are.
  FromUTF8::toMimeEncodedWord()	mb_encode_mimeheader(..., 'UTF-8', 'Q')	=?UTF-8?Q?...?= instead of =?utf-8?Q?...?=, a space is =20 instead of _, only the words that need it are encoded, and a long text is folded into several lines. Mail clients decode both the same way.
  ToUTF8::fromCombiningChar()	Normalizer::normalize(..., FORM_C)	Composes every combination Unicode defines (z + ˇ → ž), not only the 55 Latin-1 ones.
  FromUTF8::removeEmoji()	\p{Extended_Pictographic} regex	Removes emoji added in newer Unicode versions and any flag. Everything the old list removed is still removed. A text that is not valid UTF-8 is returned unchanged.

• FromUTF8::removeAccent() writes the letters with no accented form correctly: ß → ss, Ø/ø → O/o, Þ/þ → TH/th, ð → d (they were B, 0, P/p and o).

• FromUTF8::removeAccent() works on every Latin letter, not only the Latin-1 ones, using the Unicode decomposition (Normalizer): Škoda Dvořák Việt Nam → Skoda Dvorak Viet Nam (it was ?koda Dvo?ak Việt Nam). A letter followed by a combining mark (e + U+0301) loses the mark too. Œ/œ, Ł/ł, Đ/đ and ı are written as OE/oe, L/l, D/d and i.

  What it does not convert is now left as it is instead of becoming ?: other scripts, symbols such as €, ✓, “ and –, and the emoji ☹️ and ❤️. A text that is not valid UTF-8 is returned unchanged. onlyAscii() therefore replaces those characters with its own $defaultChar: onlyAscii('€5') returns 5, not ?5.

• The protected FromUTF8::baseConversion() was removed with the byte table it walked.

• FromUTF8::onlyAscii() replaces each character with one $defaultChar: onlyAscii('世界', '?') returns ??, not ?????? (it was one per byte). Tabs and line breaks are no longer removed. The return type is string instead of ?string.

Bug Fixes

• ToUTF8::fromEmoji() converts >:(, >:-(, O:), O:-), >:) and >:-). They used to be read as > or O followed by :( or :).

Requirements

• PHP 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 and 8.6 are now supported: "php": ">=8.3 <8.7". The previous <8.6 upper bound excluded PHP 8.6, since <8.6 is exclusive.
• The intl and mbstring extensions are now required.

Toolchain

• PHPUnit updated to ^12.5.

• Psalm is installed as psalm/phar (^6.16) instead of vimeo/psalm.

  vimeo/psalm lists the PHP versions it supports and no published release includes 8.6, so as a dev dependency it made composer install fail on the 8.6 build job before any test ran. psalm/phar requires only php ^8.2 and bundles its own dependencies, so it installs on every PHP version in the matrix and cannot conflict with the project's. Psalm itself still refuses to run on 8.6, which is why the Psalm job uses 8.5. composer psalm runs it.

  PHPUnit 13 is deliberately not used. It requires PHP >=8.4.1, which would break the 8.3 floor.

Continuous Integration

• The build matrix now includes PHP 8.6.
• The Psalm job now runs on PHP 8.5. Psalm declares ~8.1.31 || ~8.2.27 || ~8.3.16 || ~8.4.3 || ~8.5.0 and therefore does not run on PHP 8.6.

Housekeeping

• phpunit.xml.dist renamed to phpunit.xml.
• The gen/ scripts that generated the conversion tables were removed, along with the tables.