Unicode characters in my PHP configuration

Question

Earlier today I was having an issue where I couldn't setup my PHP7 remote interpreter on PhpStorm

I ended up finding out that I have unicode characters in my PHP configuration:

I have no idea how that happened and I probably would never have noticed without that PHPStorm issue. I searched here and here but only found posts about setting up encoding. I couldn't find any reference to phpd in my ini files so I reckon it's a core thing.

I'm running PHP 7.0.13 on Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS and PHP is installed via ap-get.

Extra info: when I run the following from CLI I don't get the unicode characters:

php -r "print_r(ini_get_all());" | grep "phpd" [phpd] => Array [phpd.t] => Array 

Any idea what I could do to fix that ?

Answer 1

After a lot of research, this is caused by ionCube loader (running the last 6.0.6 version). After disabling the extension, the phpd values disappear. I've contacted them to report the bug.