2 replies to this topic

[Fighter]

I have started writing an application for somebody where articles are to be submitted, the client in this case caters to mostly another language (croatian, and other languages around that area)

I am unaware of how PHP handles above 127 for the application, a quick example of what I am having trouble with:

echo strlen("ĀāĂ㥹ĆćĈĉĊċ");

I hope they appear on here, basically those are twelve characters and strlen makes it seem like 24! This is a bit troublesome as some statistics/ordering relies on the length of the article.

How would I come about to fix this issue? What would I need to know?

[Alexander]

PHP has no concept of byte encodings in its native strings, your compliant string may appear as the following internally:

ĀāĂ㥹ĆćĈĉĊċ

As you can see strlen will report it of 24 characters length, originally you would have account for this manually but later versions of PHP include a multibyte function library (mb) which should be enabled by default.

mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8"); //system dependent, so be explicit
echo mb_strlen("ĀāĂ㥹ĆćĈĉĊċ"); //use the mb_ function for strlen

As it uses a library (much as PCRE is used) it will naturally be slower than the standard functions, in the case you wanted to use mass automation of some sort.

Some useful documentation:
PHP: Multibyte String - Manual

[Fighter]

It returns 12, this is great! A great answer, thank you for taking the time to explain this to me in depth.