Can the PHP value mbstring.internal_encoding be set from a htaccess file?

Question

The following PHP command used to enable function overloading for multibyte data doesn't seem to work when set from inside a .htaccess file:

php_value mbstring.func_overload 7

I read there was a bug in PHP 5.2.x versions that prevented this from working properly, however I'm using PHP 5.3.0 and it still doesn't work?

But if this setting is not intended for htaccess, are there any other options available to change it? I know it could be set in the php.ini file, but if I do that there could be detrimental effects on the non mb code hosted on my server!

Answer 1

I know it could be set in the php.ini file, but if I do that there could be detrimental effects on the non mb code hosted on my server!

Well apparently the inverse is also true. According to php.net:

It is not recommended to use the function overloading option in the per-directory context, because it's not confirmed yet to be stable enough in a production environment and may lead to undefined behaviour.

Bug entries have comments that confirm this setting can only be changed in the php.ini file. So it's not possible to alter it using ini_set.