The purpose of mbstring is for working with Unicode and legacy text
encodings; but Base64, QPrint, etc. are not text encodings and don't
really belong in mbstring. PHP already contains separate implementations
of Base64, QPrint, and HTML entities. It will be better to eventually
remove these non-encodings from mbstring.
Regarding HTML entities... there is a bit more to say. mbstring's
implementation of HTML entities is different from the other built-in
implementation (htmlspecialchars and htmlentities). Those functions
convert <, >, and & to HTML entities, but mbstring does not.
It appears that the original author of mbstring intended for something
to be done with <, >, and &. He used a table to identify which
characters should be converted to HTML entities, and </>/& all have a
special value in that table. However, nothing ever checks for that
special value, so the characters are passed through unconverted.
This seems like a very useless implementation of HTML entities. The most
important characters which need to be expressed as entities in HTML
documents are those three!
The HTML decoding filter uses the `opaque` member of mbfl_convert_filter
as buffer, but there was no copy constructor defined, what caused double
frees when the filter is copied (what happens multiple times in mb_strcut(),
for instance).
Alex Dowad