How to reverse a Unicode string

Question

It was hinted in a comment to an answer to this question that PHP can not reverse Unicode strings.

As for Unicode, it works in PHP because most app

Answer 1

Grapheme functions handle UTF-8 string more correctly than mbstring and PCRE functions/ Mbstring and PCRE may break characters. You can see the defference between them by executing the following code.

function str_to_array($string)
{
    $length = grapheme_strlen($string);
    $ret = [];

    for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i += 1) {

        $ret[] = grapheme_substr($string, $i, 1);
    }

    return $ret;
}

function str_to_array2($string)
{
    $length = mb_strlen($string, "UTF-8");
    $ret = [];

    for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i += 1) {

    $ret[] = mb_substr($string, $i, 1, "UTF-8");
}

    return $ret;
}

function str_to_array3($string)
{
    return preg_split('//u', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
}

function utf8_strrev($string)
{
    return implode(array_reverse(str_to_array($string)));
}

function utf8_strrev2($string)
{
    return implode(array_reverse(str_to_array2($string)));
}

function utf8_strrev3($string)
{
    return implode(array_reverse(str_to_array3($string)));
}

// http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.grapheme-strlen.php
$string = "a\xCC\x8A"  // 'LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE' (U+00E5)
         ."o\xCC\x88"; // 'LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS'  (U+00F6)

var_dump(array_map(function($elem) { return strtoupper(bin2hex($elem)); },
[
  'should be' => "o\xCC\x88"."a\xCC\x8A",
  'grapheme' => utf8_strrev($string),
  'mbstring' => utf8_strrev2($string),
  'pcre' => utf8_strrev3($string)
]));

The result is here.

array(4) {
  ["should be"]=>
  string(12) "6FCC8861CC8A"
  ["grapheme"]=>
  string(12) "6FCC8861CC8A"
  ["mbstring"]=>
  string(12) "CC886FCC8A61"
  ["pcre"]=>
  string(12) "CC886FCC8A61"
}

IntlBreakIterator can be used since PHP 5.5 (intl 3.0);

function utf8_strrev($str)
{
    $it = IntlBreakIterator::createCodePointInstance();
    $it->setText($str);

    $ret = '';
    $pos = 0;
    $prev = 0;

    foreach ($it as $pos) {
        $ret = substr($str, $prev, $pos - $prev) . $ret;
        $prev = $pos;
    }

    return $ret;  
}