Check unicode in PHP

Question

How can I check whether a character is a Unicode character or not with PHP?

Answer 1

Strings in PHP are bytestreams - not character streams. You can't actually have unicode strings in PHP; You need to encode your characters with some encoding. If you want to cover the entire unicode range, UTF-8 is the most obvious choice.

If you want to get the codepoint of a utf-8 encoded bytestream, you can use this library: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/php-utf8/

However, I wonder what exactly you need this for? Most likely, you can solve all your woes by simply using utf-8.