Here’s a good reason to keep all your development and production environments the same.  The task was simple enough.  I wanted to strip a UTF-8 encoded string of all punctuation.  Here’s some example code that does it, using PHP’s PCRE library.



On PHP 5.2.4:


% php -i | grep PCRE
PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) Support => enabled
PCRE Library Version => 6.6 06-Feb-2006
% php pcre_test.php
ss



On PHP 5.2.6:


% php -i | grep PCRE
PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) Support => enabled
PCRE Library Version => 7.6 2008-01-28
% php pcre_test.php
TAGholy moley     báts were killed by  dogs for 50 ümlauts



Only took me a day to figure out.