Getting the first character of a string with $str[0]

Question

I want to get the first letter of a string and I\'ve noticed that $str[0] works great. I am just not sure whether this is \'good practice\', as that notation is

Answer 1

In case of multibyte (unicode) strings using str[0] can cause a trouble. mb_substr() is a better solution. For example:

$first_char = mb_substr($title, 0, 1);

Some details here: Get first character of UTF-8 string