How do I find out how many bytes a character has?

Question

I was wondering how do I find out how many bytes does a character have?

Answer 1

• ASCII is 7 bits.
• Most other languages use 8 bits (1 byte).
• Many eastern languages (Chinese, Japanese) use 16 bits (2 bytes).
• Unicode is usually 32 bits (4 bytes).

How a character is stored and represented depends on the programming language and the platform you are using.

Answer 2

If you want to find out how many UTF-8 bytes a letter in a PHP string has then:

print strlen(mb_substr($string, 0, 1, "utf-8"));

strlen() returns the raw byte length, while mb_substr() returns a "character" according to the charset/encoding. In this example from position 0.