Deprecation: #87894 - GeneralUtility::idnaEncode 

See forge#87894

Description 

PHP has the native function idn_to_ascii($domain, IDNA_DEFAULT, INTL_IDNA_VARIANT_UTS46) for converting UTF-8 based domains to ascii-based ("punicode") which is available in all supported PHP versions using "symfony/polyfill-intl-idn".

For this reason the method GeneralUtility::idnaEncode() has been marked as deprecated.

Impact 

Calling GeneralUtility::idnaEncode() directly will trigger a PHP E_USER_DEPRECATED error.

Affected Installations 

Any TYPO3 installation with third-party extensions calling this method.

Migration 

Use idn_to_ascii($domain, IDNA_DEFAULT, INTL_IDNA_VARIANT_UTS46); instead.

Please be aware that contrary to GeneralUtility::idnaEncode() the native PHP function only works on domain names, not email addresses or similar. In order to encode email addresses split the address at the last '@' and use idn_to_ascii() on that last part. Also, if there is an error in converting a string, a bool false is returned.