Forgot to mention php version 4.1.2

From Herbert Keijers (herbert.keijers at vanhorne.nl) Sunday, 5 June 2005, 05:20 PM:

Some (elder) php4 versions do not support the ctype functions.

So it is not a bug.

See my postings in : http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=24762

"PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function ctype_space() in .../moodle/lib/searchlib.php on line 296"

This function requires the ctype extension for PHP:
extension_loaded('ctype');

course/lib.php
lib/adodb/adodb-datadict.inc.php
lib/searchlib.php
search/Zend/Search/Lucene/Analysis/Analyzer/Common/Text.php
search/Zend/Search/Lucene/Search/QueryTokenizer.php

The ctype module is optional[1] in PHP, and other distributions (Gentoo for one) optionally include it.
The resolution to this this long-standing bug is to add ctype as a PHP requirement in environment.xml

Please vote for this issue.

[1] http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.ctype.php#ctype.installation

Possibilities :

• make ctype an official requirement for Moodle;
• change the ctype_space() call to a trim() (seems to be equivalent) and include a "western-equivalent" function to ctype_alpha (see http://au.php.net/manual/en/function.ctype-alpha.php#75854 for the code, which is probably a problem for scripts not using western characters);
• find a way to do without ctype functions.

1) course.lib use looks really trivial, It's being used to check if the fist letter is alpha (and the list of log actions are simple english words). Can be matched with regexp instead.
2) searchlib.php use of ctype_space can be also safely replaced by one simple trim() === ''

With this... all Moodle 1.9 would be ctype_* free (unless you enable HTMLPurifier or Global search). Perhaps it could be added as OPTIONAL.

For 2.0 we must REQUIRE ctype IMO, mainly because HTMLPurifier has high probabilities to become the standard filter and we cannot patch it locally.

Ciao

Eloy, should I commit the patch (attached to this issue) to 1.9? If we require ctype for 2.0, I will modify the patch for this requirement in head.

I think your patch about doing ctype optional in 1.9 is ok. So +1 for that, with 3 comments:

1) It should be applied from 17_STABLE to HEAD (that way people running older Moodle versions will know about that recommendation, without downloading xml).
2) If you add new strings that are going to be showed by the installer... you need to add them to all those branches too (en_utf8) and, important, add them to install/stringnames.txt . That way, nightly package generators are able to put them in the proper installer lang files.
3) Perhaps I'd delay this until next HQ chat to see if definitively we are going to make ctype mandatory for 2.0. To send the whole solution in the same commit.

About your $modaction question for ML... I think I was looking for that when I wrote my previous comment here and I think all I saw were English tokens. So I really think it could be safe to change it. In fact, hehe, exactly in the previous line of the ctype_alpha() call, there is one $firstletter = substr($modaction, 0, 1); and that breaks UTF-8 (non-ascii) strings, so yes, I guess it only can contain english (ascii) letters.

Ciao

I really think patches are ok. Anyway, I'd backport them to 1.8 as they are trivial and can make life better for some sites.

FYC... with MD. feel free to close this definitively once backported (or not backported).

Only one small comment... install/lang/xxx file must not be edited by us at all. All we need to do it to add them to the install/stringnames.txt file and then one nightly process will build automatically the install/lang/xxx files.

Ciao

I really think in this case it's enough to backport up to 1.8, because when the ctype is going to be a requirement is 2.0, and 2.0 requires 1.9 to be installed so everybody will have that info.

So, I think this is ok as is now. Thanks!