Access character in a string with square braces doesn't output correctly

Question

I have a string and i want to access ä character. But it outputs question mark instead of correct character.

Here is my code.

$array = array('ä', 'b', 'c');
$string = 'äbc';
echo $string; // äbc
echo '<br />';
echo $string[0]; // ?
echo '<br />';
echo $array[0]; // ä

DEMO

Can anyone tell me why?

UPDATED

echo strlen($string); // returns 4
echo mb_substr($string, 0, 1); // ä

I think it has to do with the character encoding, if you replace `ä` with `x` it works as expected. — Celeritas, Nov 13 '16 at 10:43
This is actually a duplicate of this question, though it's hard to tell http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13508937/get-first-character-of-utf-8-string — Celeritas, Nov 13 '16 at 10:49
@Celeritas: question was edited... and `string[0]` won't work for multibyte chars on it's own anyway... — l'L'l, Nov 13 '16 at 11:01
@l'L'l sorry but no it wasn't, at least not in a way that effects your wrongness — Celeritas, Nov 13 '16 at 11:03

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 13 '16 at 10:43

Depending on your charset, the letter ä is a multi-byte letter. When you access a string using array access, it returns the first byte. In case of a multi-byte ä the returns a non printable control character.

Accessing the array using array-access returns the first element, regardless of it's length, in this case the multi-byte ä.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:29

You need to use mb_substr() like so

$array = array('ä', 'b', 'c');
$string = 'äbc';
echo $string; // äbc
echo '<br />';
echo mb_substr($string, 0, 1, 'UTF8'); // replace UTF8 with whatever charset you are using
echo '<br />';
echo $array[0]; // ä

DEMO

The reason is because PHP assumes characters take one byte. But this is not the case in your situation with ä so you need to use mb_substr() instead of the index or substr().

I strongly recommend reading the answers to this question Get first character of UTF-8 string

Access character in a string with square braces doesn't output correctly

2 Answers2