Discussion: Hard-require the mbstring PHP extension?

[Oliver Klee]

To simplify things, could we hard-require the mbstring PHP extension via composer.json and deprecate the corresponding setting?

(This would be a breaking change, i.e., it would make sense to time this to happen just before the 9.0.0 release.)

@sabberworm @westonruter What do you think?

[Weston Ruter]

We don't currently require the mbstring extension in the AMP plugin. Also:

mbstring is a non-default extension. This means it is not enabled by default. You must explicitly enable the module with the configure option.

WordPress core does not require it, but it does polyfill mb_substr() and mb_strlen(). Nevertheless, php-css-parser also uses mb_strpos() and mb_strtolower(), which are not polyfilled in WP.

So I don't think we can safely depend on it without breaking many sites.

[Oliver Klee]

@westonruter Thanks! Closing then.