PHP string functions vs mbstring functions

Question

I have an application that has so far been in English only. Content encoding throughout templates and database has been UTF-8. I am now looking to internationalize/translate the

Answer 1

Check the status of the mbstring.func_overload flag in php.ini

If (ini_get('mbstring.func_overload') & 2) then functions like strlen() (as listed here) are already overloaded by the mb_strlen() function, so there is no need for you to call the mb_* functions explicitly.