IssueTracker

PHP should come with the ICONV extension because it is not only useful to get better character support in PHP (by default PHP has binary strings and the only UTF-8 string class is DOMText and there is some UTF-8 support in PCRE) but also because other extensions like DOM also make use of it.

Example Code:

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?><root />');
$doc->documentElement->appendChild($doc->createElement('füürüü', 'ärööö'));
echo $doc->saveXML();

With the current preview configuration this creates the following error and as the following example-output shows, stops output at the problematic position:

DOMDocument::saveXML(): output conversion failed due to conv error, bytes 0xFC 0xFC 0x72 0xFC
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<root><f

When PHP comes with the iconv extension this is no problem. Additionally this offers recoding support for diverse character-encodings which often is necessary for webapplications.

Even though this is an XML example, DOM also supports HTML and the encoding chosen in the example (Windows-1252; CP1252) is the default for HMTL5 so it would be a bit of a pity to not have support for that, it's nothing that specific by far.

Iconv Extension: http://php.net/iconv
Link: http://hakre.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/php-on-google-app-engine-quick-first-review/
Link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2559497/does-google-app-engine-support-php#comment23906326_16601201