CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphebrew
Idan Neeman
Idan Neeman

Reputation: 119

compare if with hebrew letter

I write code that work only with english letters. when I ctry to do it with hebrew letter I get error.

the code:

<?php
$idan="emr";
$firstletter = mb_substr($idan, 0, 1, 'UTF-8');
if ($firstletter=='e') 
echo "tov";
else echo "lo tove";
?>

work good. but the code:

<?php
$idan="אבהבה";
$firstletter = mb_substr($idan, 0, 1, 'UTF-8');
if ($firstletter=='א') 
echo "tov";
else echo "lo tove";
?>

not work, How I can to fix it?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 403

Answers (2)

user149341
user149341

Reputation:

Your code worked correctly (e.g. printed tov) when I saved it to a PHP file and ran it. If you are seeing different results, you may want to check your text editor settings and ensure that you're saving the file as UTF-8.

Upvotes: 1

emartel
emartel

Reputation: 7773

You do realize that mb_substr works from left to right? (is Hebrew written from right to left?) You are therefore reading the first character which is ה not א. To get the first letter from the right (the last one), use -1 as a starting index:

$firstletter = mb_substr($idan, -1, 1, 'UTF-8');

You can also use mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8"); to set the encoding for every call, instead of propagating it (if you're making many calls to mb_ functions)

Edit: Following your comments, here's a quick example of a script that handles letters depending on the language:

$desiredLetter = 'e';
$startIndex = 0;

// some condition to figure out the language
if(mb_detect_encoding($idan, 'ASCII', true) == FALSE)
{
    $desiredLetter = 'א';
    $startIndex = -1;
}

$firstletter = mb_substr($idan, $startIndex, 1, 'UTF-8');
if ($firstletter == $desiredLetter) 
    echo "tov";
else 
    echo "lo tove";

Upvotes: 3

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