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A comment on PHP 8. Parent comment

Re:PHP 8 by kilburn on Thursday November 26, 2020 @01:01PM (#25222194)
You cannot use the "basic" string manipulation functions (strcmp, strlen, etc.) because these are not unicode-aware.

However, you have the multibyte string functions family that can operate in a wide range of encodings (including UTF-8 which is the default in any sane installation nowadays).

[1] https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php

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Re:PHP 8 by electrotype on Thursday November 26, 2020 @01:10PM (#25222265)
I think I had issues even with mbstring, for some characters like "œ". But maybe I'm wrong.
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Re:PHP 8 by duskwuff on Thursday November 26, 2020 @01:51PM (#25222624)
œ works fine with mb_strlen(). What might have been tripping you up is combining character sequences:

https://3v4l.org/DM4pC

Handling those "correctly" with a string length function gets complicated in any language, as there isn't a 1-to-1 mapping between Unicode codepoints and visible glyphs.

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Re:PHP 8 by njuw on Thursday November 26, 2020 @02:27PM (#25222874)
In PHP grapheme_strlen achieves what you're describing: https://3v4l.org/HPOb3
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Re:PHP 8 by electrotype on Thursday November 26, 2020 @01:55PM (#25222657)
Yes, I think you nailed what my issue was.
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