Assigned to the maintainer.

If you change mbstring.func_overload=6 to mbstring.func_overload=0, does the problem go away?

Yes. It works if I disable overloading.
When I'm working with lobs (binary data in general) under this configuration I use mb_strlen($str, 'ASCII') instead of strlen($str). Otherwise, the variable would be treated as string and any unicode escape sequence would generate an error.
Maybe a function called something like 'bytecount' could help to avoid this situation.

Thanks.

Another workaround is to add a '-n' to the cli invocation inside of go-pear.bat
That way no php.ini is used.

I think I'll opt for door #3 which is to insert:

if (function_exists('mb_internal_encoding')) {
mb_internal_encoding('ASCII');
}

at the top of the .phar

Please try using this CVS snapshot:

  http://snaps.php.net/php5-latest.tar.gz
 
For Windows:
 
  http://snaps.php.net/win32/php5-win32-latest.zip

when you do this, please grab go-pear.phar directly from http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar - and please do this no sooner than 1 hour after this message, as pear.php.net is synced once per hour with cvs

No feedback was provided for this bug for over a week, so it is
being suspended automatically. If you are able to provide the
information that was originally requested, please do so and change
the status of the bug back to "Open".

Closed