Table of Contents

PHP RFC: Oniguruma maintenance was end

Oniguruma maintenance was end at 2025-04-24. PHP uses mbregex(mb_ereg ...) functions. We need to decide the future of this group of functions.

Introduction

It is likely that the following points need to be decided.

  1. Maintenance version: 8.2. 8.3, 8.4, 8.5
  2. Deprecate version: 8.6(Next to 8.5)
  3. Drop support to 9.0

Proposal

It is likely that the following points need to be decided.

Deprecate and drop mbregex functions:

Constants:

php.ini options:

Backward Incompatible Changes

We can not use mbregex functions.

Proposed PHP Version(s)

8.6

RFC Impact

To Existing Extensions

Mbregex

To SAPIs

Describe the impact to CLI, Development web server, embedded PHP etc.

Open Issues

https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/18467

Future Scope

This section should outline areas that you are not planning to work on in the scope of this RFC, but that might be iterated upon in the future by yourself or another contributor.

This helps with long-term planning and ensuring this RFC does not prevent future work.

Voting Choices

Implementation

After the RFC is implemented, this section should contain:

  1. the version(s) it was merged into
  2. a link to the git commit(s)
  3. a link to the PHP manual entry for the feature

References

Links to external references, discussions, or RFCs.

Rejected Features

Keep this updated with features that were discussed on the mail lists.

Changelog

If there are major changes to the initial proposal, please include a short summary with a date or a link to the mailing list announcement here, as not everyone has access to the wikis' version history.