Using UTF-8 charset with PHP - are mb functions required?

Question

These past few days I\'ve been working toward converting my PHP code base from latin1 to UTF-8. I\'ve read the two main solutions are to either replace the single byte funct

Answer 1

You can use this http://php.net/manual/en/mbstring.overload.php setting in php.ini file, so you don't need to change you code.

But be careful, because not all string function will be automatically changed. This is one: http://php.net/manual/en/function.substr-replace.php

Answer 2

As soon as you're examining or modifying a multibyte string, you need to use a mb_* function. A very quick example which demonstrates why:

$str = "abcžđščćöçefg";
mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");

echo "strlen: ".strlen($str)."\n";
echo "mb_strlen: ".mb_strlen($str)."\n";

This prints out:

strlen: 20
mb_strlen: 13