PHP mb_substr() not working correctly?

Question

This code

print mb_substr(\'éxxx\', 0, 1);

prints an empty space :(

It is supposed to print the first character, é. This seems

Answer 1

In practice I've found that, in some systems, multi-byte functions default to ISO-8859-1 for internal encoding. That effectively ruins their ability to handle multi-byte text.

Setting a good default will probably fix this and some other issues:

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');