I have been working with some funny html characters lately and due to the nightmare in manipulating them between mysql and php, I got the database column set to utf8, then store characters with html enity "ọ" as in the database and set the encoding on php as "utf8".
This is where mb_strlen became more useful than strlen. While strlen('') gives result as 3, mb_strlen('','UTF-8') gives 1 as expected.
But left(column1,1) in mysql still gives wrong char for a multibyte string. In the example above, I had to do left(column1,3) to get the correct string from mysql. I am now about to investigate multibyte manipulation in mysql.
mb_strlen
Description
int mb_strlen ( string str [, string encoding] )mb_strlen() returns number of characters in string str having character encoding encoding. A multi-byte character is counted as 1.
encoding is character encoding for str. If encoding is omitted, internal character encoding is used.
See also mb_internal_encoding(), strlen().
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User Contributed Notes
filatei at gmail dot com
13-Aug-2006 01:48
13-Aug-2006 01:48
Peter Albertsson
11-Nov-2004 06:21
11-Nov-2004 06:21
If you wish to find the byte length of a multi-byte string when you are using mbstring.func_overload 2 and UTF-8 strings, then you can use the following:
mb_strlen($utf8_string, 'latin1');