Using UTF-8 charset with PHP - are mb functions required?

Question

These past few days I\'ve been working toward converting my PHP code base from latin1 to UTF-8. I\'ve read the two main solutions are to either replace the single byte funct

Answer 1

As far as I understand the issue, as long as all your data is 100% in utf-8 - and that means user input, database, and also the encoding of the PHP files themselves if you have special characters in them - this is true true for search and comparison operations. As @ntd points out, a non-multibyte strlen() will produce wrong results when run on a string that contains multibyte characters.

THis is a great article on the basics of encoding.