Unicode support
When you're creating a website, you hardly have to think about the character encoding. You only have to decide how you tell the user agent what encoding you're using, but with a little help of Apache's .htaccess file, you only have to make that decision once. However, if you're building an application, the character encoding might become a problem. That's where PHP's new Unicode support comes in handy. With its support, PHP can automatically encode and decode the in and output of the script making sure both the database and the user agent receive the encoding they need without the need of any extra functions for the encoding conversion.