The only thing I don't like here is different path for converting PHP arguments to Formattables. I understand there's no interface to fetch the types in the pattern for the named arguments, but technically, there's no public way to do it for numeric arguments and we have to resort to reading private state of MessageFormat. Given that we already to such a thing, we might as well got the same path for named arguments.

Yeah, I'm not in love with the different way to convert the args to Formattables either, to be honest.

I looked down the path of trying to do it how the numbered-argument code does but internally, libicu does not populate the argTypes array for named arguments, so that information isn't even available.

I suppose one other possible path would be to use the (public) getFormats() method and then make some decisions based on the classes of the Format objects.

Yes, but MessageFormatAdapter is a friend class. We can add methods to MessageFormatAdapter declared in msgformat_helpers.cpp to access whatever we want from MessageFormat.

I've attached a new patch that makes use of the MessageFormat's internal MessagePattern to attempt to deduce the right types for each argument -- for both named and numbered arguments, to keep things consistent.

There are some new tests to verify named argument behavior as well as subpatterns (for both named and numbered arguments), which was the reason I started investigating this in the first place.

I've only tested this with icu 4.8 and 4.9, though. http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/classMessagePattern.html says that MessagePattern is stable as of 4.8, so I am not sure how this will behave with older versions of ICU.

Thanks! I'll see if I can get this closed this weekend.

I made some changes on top of your patch:

https://github.com/cataphract/php-src/compare/fr61871

I still haven't tested this in old versions of ICU.

This bug has been fixed in SVN.

Snapshots of the sources are packaged every three hours; this change
will be in the next snapshot. You can grab the snapshot at
http://snaps.php.net/.

 For Windows:

http://windows.php.net/snapshots/
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.

Is it possible this issue still affects php 5.4?

I'm occuring the mentioned behavior and started browsing the source-code (github and also downloaded a snapshot-tarball) in which I could not find any hint for this (imho important) feature to be integrated.

We don't generally add features to patch releases. It will only be in 5.5. If you need the feature in 5.2/5.3/5.4, you install intl 3.x from PECL (pecl install intl-beta).

Thank you very much for your really fast and helpful answer :)

Unfortunately this function still does not work completely as it should, 
as the following example shows:

$pattern = <<<_MSG_
{num_guests} -- 
{num_guests, plural, offset:1
      =0 {{host} does not give a party.}
      =1 {{host} invites {guest} to her party.}
      =2 {{host} invites {guest} and one other person to her party.}
     other {{host} invites {guest} and # other people to her party.}}
_MSG_;



$a = array('gender_of_host' => 'male', 'num_guests' => 4, 'host' => 'ralph', 
'guest' => 'beep');

$m = msgfmt_format_message('en_US', $pattern, $a);
print "$m\n";


$a['gender_of_host'] = 'female';
$a['num_guests'] = 49;

$m = msgfmt_format_message('en_US', $pattern, $a);
print "$m\n";