utf 8 - PHP Multibyte String Functions

Question

Today I ran into a problem with the php function strpos() because it returned FALSE even if the correct result was obviously 0. This was because one parameter was encoded in UTF-8, but the other (origin is a HTTP GET parameter) obviously not.

Now I have noticed that using the mb_strpos function solved my problem.

My question is now: Is it wisely to use the PHP multibyte string functions generally to avoid theses problems in future? Should I avoid the traditional strpos, strlen, ereg, etc., etc. functions at all?

Notice: I don't want to set mbstring.func_overload global in php.ini, because this leads to other problems when using the PEAR library. I am using PHP4.

Answer 1

There have been some problems with the mb_ * functions in PHP versions prior to 5.2. So if your code is going on multiple platforms with different versions of PHP, strange behavior can occur. Furthermore the mb_ strpos function is rather slow, it has to skip the number of characters specified by the offset parameter to get the real byte position used internally. In loops depending on the strpos/mb_strpos functionality this can become a major bottleneck.