webpatser/portable-ascii

Portable ASCII library - modernized for PHP 8.1+ with performance optimizations.

dev-main 2026-04-09 09:11 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8.1

Requires (Dev)

• pestphp/pest: ^3.0 || ^4.0

Suggests

• ext-intl: For fastest transliteration via ICU (strict mode)
• ext-mbstring: For optimized character splitting in transliteration (-24%)

Replaces

• voku/portable-ascii: 2.0.99

MIT

• Christoph Kempen

• slug
• transliterate
• ascii
• unicode
• php8

README

Modernized drop-in replacement for voku/portable-ascii — requires PHP 8.1+.

Why?

The original voku/portable-ascii package (471M+ installs) still requires PHP 7.0 and has unresolved PHP 8.4 deprecation warnings. This fork modernizes the codebase, fixes transliteration bugs, and is 36-50% faster while keeping full API compatibility.

Zero breaking changes. Same namespace, same methods, same behavior.

What changed

• PHP 8.1 minimum (was 7.0)
• Typed properties and return types throughout
• Fixed implicit nullable parameter deprecation (to_transliterate())
• Replaced O(n*m) character replacement loop with strtr() — single C-level pass
• Adaptive sparse/dense detection for optimal replacement strategy
• mb_str_split() replacing preg_match_all for character splitting (when ext-mbstring available)
• Cascading transliteration: ext-intl -> ext-iconv -> manual byte decoding
• Inlined is_ascii() regex for faster hot-path checks
• Fixed Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Austrian (Eszett), and Hindi transliteration mappings
• Test suite ported to Pest 4 (247 tests, 1602 assertions)

Performance

Benchmarked on PHP 8.5 with real-world inputs (German/French/Russian blog titles, product names, URL slugs, long text). Each profile was run in an isolated process with 20s CPU cooldown between runs, 5000 iterations, median of 5 runs.

Profile	to_ascii	to_slugify	to_transliterate	Total	vs Original
original (voku 2.0.3)	742 ms	936 ms	1554 ms	3953 ms	—
fork (no extensions)	268 ms	382 ms	1540 ms	2455 ms	-38%
fork + mbstring	265 ms	378 ms	1174 ms	2073 ms	-48%
fork + all extensions	270 ms	371 ms	1171 ms	2072 ms	-48%

The to_ascii() and to_slugify() improvements are pure PHP — no extensions needed. ext-mbstring accelerates to_transliterate() by 24% via mb_str_split() replacing preg_match_all for character splitting.

Run the benchmark yourself:

php benchmark/run.php 5000           # fork vs original (side by side)
php benchmark/run-profiles.php 5000  # extension profile comparison

Installation

composer require webpatser/portable-ascii

This automatically replaces voku/portable-ascii via Composer's replace directive. No code changes needed — \voku\helper\ASCII continues to work.

For best transliteration performance, install ext-mbstring:

sudo apt install php-mbstring

Usage

use voku\helper\ASCII;

// Transliterate to ASCII
ASCII::to_ascii('Düsseldorf', 'de');  // 'Duesseldorf'

// Check if string is ASCII
ASCII::is_ascii('hello');  // true

// Transliterate with fallback character
ASCII::to_transliterate('こんにちは', '?');  // 'konnichiha'

// Generate URL slug
ASCII::to_slugify('Hello Wörld!');  // 'hello-woerld'

Compatibility

Works with Laravel 11, 12, and 13. All extensions are optional — the library auto-detects what's available and uses the fastest path.

Extension	Impact	Used by
ext-mbstring	-24% on to_transliterate()	mb_str_split() for character splitting
ext-intl	Fastest transliteration via ICU	to_transliterate() in strict mode only

Credits

This package is a modernized fork of voku/portable-ascii by Lars Moelleken. The original work, including all 193 Unicode-to-ASCII data tables and the transliteration engine, is his. Licensed under MIT.

License

MIT