CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php
BuckyBadger
BuckyBadger

Reputation: 141

What is the simplest way to reference a Multibyte string in PHP?

My question: In PHP it is easy to reference the single byte string, $single = "abc"; for example,

echo $single[0]; //"a"

However for the multibyte string $multi = "äåö", I get "nonsense", that is,

echo $multi[0]; //?

I know one can reference the individual letters of a multi byte string by coding as follows:

mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");
echo mb_substr($multi,1,1);//which gives the right answer "å"

But isn't there an easier way to do this? I am especially looking for a way where I can reference the multi byte string with square brackets and just one parameter as for the single byte case.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 124

Answers (1)

Wrikken
Wrikken

Reputation: 70500

No, Unicode support is on the table for new versions, but it is not ready yet. It will get there at some point presumably, but not yet.

from the manual:

A string is series of characters, where a character is the same as a byte. This means that PHP only supports a 256-character set, and hence does not offer native Unicode support.

The closest you could get to this is implementing an object implementing ArrayAccess using a __toString() function and a LOT of fiddling. Not recommended in my opinion.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions