substr with japanese characters issue

Question

i'm echoing japanese characters fine but when i try to substr and echo out part of the string it just turn to question marks ��

note: i set my header to utf-8

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

and made the meta <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

$word = "せんせい";
echo $word;       //works just fine

echo substr($word,-1);    //now it just echoes �

//this one also failed
echo $word[0];    //echoes �

Please understand what the header does, it simply makes a claim that the content you give is encoded in `UTF-8`. Which it is not because `substr` mutilates the bytes to invalid `UTF-8` — Esailija, Jul 31 '12 at 10:19

Michael Robinson · Answer 1 · 2012-07-31T10:24:22.253

10

When working with your multibyte strings, you'll need to use the multibyte string functions, in this case mb_substr.

edited Jul 31 '12 at 10:24

answered Jul 31 '12 at 10:18

Michael Robinson

29,278
12
104
130

1

@N.B. sorry to have offended you so. – Michael Robinson Jul 31 '12 at 10:20
3

With all my might, I will find strength to forgive and forget. – N.B. Jul 31 '12 at 10:22

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 31 '12 at 10:19

3

Try multibyte substrings, mb_substr() info found here This function is made for characters not in the english ascii code set.

answered Jul 31 '12 at 10:19

Branden S. Smith

1,161
7
13

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 07 '15 at 05:10

2

mb_substr

will work. But, remember to add the following line at the top of your script:

mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");//Sets the internal character encoding to UTF-8, for mb_substr to work

answered Jan 07 '15 at 05:10

dev4life

10,785
6
60
73

substr with japanese characters issue

3 Answers3