Can we use non-ASCII names?

[drmnk]

Hi! I've got two questions - can we start use non-ASCII in our .env files?
And if not (because it's obiously not possible, I try it) - why?

It can be very convenient sometimes use names variables in native language.

Thanks for the great library!

[GrahamCampbell]

can we start use non-ASCII in our .env files?

What exactly do you mean by this. Could you be very specific please? Do you mean the name of the file, the names of the variables, the values of the variables? What is the use case for that?

[drmnk]

I'm sorry. I mean the names of the variables.

I see benefits of this in using .env file as a simple config file when you need to just set 2 or 3 variables before executing of the program, not for service/db connectiom , but for inner logic.

I wrote the simple data cruncher for my accounting raw data, that gives me nice reports and make some http queries. It's plain php, cli-based, no frameworks, and need a few settings tuned before executing.

Like this, for example:

ДатаЗакрытияРасчетногоПериода='2022-04-01T00:00'

Translation for this would be like "Closing Date of the Settlement Period", and I don't even sure that I translated it correctly. Purpose of the variable is not obvious from it's name. Maybe the proper way would be to create another 'config.php' file and stores everything in that, why not. But we already have '.env' file that works as config-storage.

Of course nothing is stop me from calling it "ClosingDate", but I'm just curious is it possible to name variables in Unicode.
Python dotenv (https://pypi.org/project/python-dotenv/) works with non-ASCII variable names.

Sorry if my question seems weird to you.

[aidabeorn]

To answer your question, as I tried to figure out why it would work, there seems to be a test case to explicitly not permit this:
https://github.com/vlucas/phpdotenv/blob/master/tests/Dotenv/Parser/EntryParserTest.php#L142-L146
The commit doesn't have any justification, so I'm curious @GrahamCampbell what you got to say?

Usecase is pretty obvious as many government contracts demand things to be in their native language. As much as we might dislike mixing languages (PHP itself using english keywords), it may very well be a requirement. PHP itself doesn't have any issues with unicode in variable, class names etc. so I see no reason why not to permit it.

[GrahamCampbell]

Fixed in v5.5.0.