CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php
Robin Alexander
Robin Alexander

Reputation: 1004

php substr with special characters like German Umlaute ä,ö and ü

I would like to crop a text string to three characters. Doing so, using $name_short = substr($name, 0, 3); works great. But as so as the text contains German Umlaute like ä,ö or ü within the first three characters, Würzburg for example is shortened to W&u. Using $name_short = substr(html_entity_decode($name), 0, 3); works nicely and keeps the Umlaute, but the result is not Wür (for Würzburg), but Wü. I have no idea how to if/else my code correctly to check if there are Umlaute or other special characters from other languages within the first three characters.

So I could crop the string to 4 characters if special characters are found, otherwise to 3.

This made it work:

$name = html_entity_decode($name);
$name_short = mb_substr($name, 0, 3);

Thanks for your help!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4203

Answers (3)

Ashish Tiwari
Ashish Tiwari

Reputation: 2277

Try mb_substr() instead of substr() like below:


        $name = "Würzburg";
        $name_short = mb_substr($name, 0, 3);

Upvotes: 7

William Perron
William Perron

Reputation: 1398

The problem comes from the fact those special characters (such as ä, ö, ü, œ and others) use more than one byte. So the result you get by using substr() is technically correct as it returns a 3-byte long string.

Using the multibyte version of the function should fix that problem: $name_short = mb_substr($name, 0, 3);

Also, as @arkascha mentioned, using html_entity_decode() will not help you in your situation as it doesn't affect special characters.

mb_substr doc: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mb-substr.php

Upvotes: 1

Imran
Imran

Reputation: 4750

This may be an issue of encoding...

You can try mb_substr($name,0,3,'UTF-8');

Upvotes: 2

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