Why use multibyte string functions in PHP?

Question

At the moment, I don\'t understand why it is really important to use mbstring functions in PHP when dealing with UTF-8? My locale under linux is already set

Answer 1

People here don't understand UTF-8.

You do not need to use UTF-8 aware code to process UTF-8. For the most part.

I've even written a Unicode uppercaser/lowercaser, and NFC and NFD transforms, using only byte-aware functions. It's hard to think of anything more complicated than that, that needs such delicate and detailed treatment of UTF-8. And yet it still works with byte-only functions.

It's very rare that you need UTF-8 aware code. Maybe to count the number of characters, or to move an insertion point forward by 1 character. But actually, even then your code won't work ;) because of decomposed characters.

But if all you are doing is replacements, finding stuff, or even parsing syntax, you just need byte-aware functions.

I'll explain why.

It's because no UTF-8 character can be found inside any other UTF-8 character. That's how it is designed.

Try to explain to me how you can get text processing errors, in terms of a multi-byte system where no character can be found inside another character? Just one example case! The simplest you can think of.