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

Here is my answer in plain English. A single Japanese and Chinese and Korean character take more than a single byte. Eg., a typical charactert say x is takes 1 byte in English it will take more than 1 byte in Japanese and Chinese and Korean. Now PHP's standard string functions are meant to treat a single character as 1 byte. So in case you are trying to do compare two Japanese or Chinese or Korean characters they will not work as expected. For example the length of "Hello World!" in Japanese or Chinese or Korean will have more than 12 bytes.

Read http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.mbstring.php