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

multibyte => multi + byte.

1) It is use to work with string which is in other language(means not in English) format.

2) Default PHP string functions only work proper with English (or releted to it) language.

3) If you want to use strlen() or strpos() or uppercase() or strreplace() for special character,
           Suppose We need to apply string functions on "Hello".
           In chines (你好), Arabic (مرحبا), Japanese (こんにちは), Hindi ( नमस्ते), Gujarati (હેલો).
           Different language can it's own character sets

so that mbstring introduced for communicate with various languages like (chines,Japanese etc).