Function Overloading Feature
This feature has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 7.2.0, and REMOVED as of PHP 8.0.0. Relying on this feature is highly discouraged.
You might often find it difficult to get an existing PHP application to work in a given multibyte environment. This happens because most PHP applications out there are written with the standard string functions such as substr(), which are known to not properly handle multibyte-encoded strings.
mbstring supports a 'function overloading' feature which enables you to add multibyte awareness to such an application without code modification by overloading multibyte counterparts on the standard string functions. For example, mb_substr() is called instead of substr() if function overloading is enabled. This feature makes it easy to port applications that only support single-byte encodings to a multibyte environment in many cases.
To use function overloading, set
mbstring.func_overload in php.ini to a
positive value that represents a combination of bitmasks specifying
the categories of functions to be overloaded. It should be set
to 1 to overload the mail() function. 2 for string
functions, 4 for regular expression functions. For example,
if it is set to 7, mail, strings and regular expression functions will
be overloaded. The list of overloaded functions are shown below.
| value of mbstring.func_overload | original function | overloaded function |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | mail() | mb_send_mail() |
| 2 | strlen() | mb_strlen() |
| 2 | strpos() | mb_strpos() |
| 2 | strrpos() | mb_strrpos() |
| 2 | substr() | mb_substr() |
| 2 | strtolower() | mb_strtolower() |
| 2 | strtoupper() | mb_strtoupper() |
| 2 | stripos() | mb_stripos() |
| 2 | strripos() | mb_strripos() |
| 2 | strstr() | mb_strstr() |
| 2 | stristr() | mb_stristr() |
| 2 | strrchr() | mb_strrchr() |
| 2 | substr_count() | mb_substr_count() |
Note:
It is not recommended to use the function overloading option in the per-directory context, because it's not confirmed yet to be stable enough in a production environment and may lead to undefined behaviour.
