How do I find the number of bytes within UTF-8 string with PHP?

Luke picture Luke · Mar 5, 2010 · Viewed 11.8k times · Source

I have the following function from the php.net site to determine the # of bytes in an ASCII and UTF-8 string:

<?php 
/** 
 * Count the number of bytes of a given string. 
 * Input string is expected to be ASCII or UTF-8 encoded. 
 * Warning: the function doesn't return the number of chars 
 * in the string, but the number of bytes. 
 * 
 * @param string $str The string to compute number of bytes 
 * 
 * @return The length in bytes of the given string. 
 */ 
function strBytes($str) 
{ 
  // STRINGS ARE EXPECTED TO BE IN ASCII OR UTF-8 FORMAT 

  // Number of characters in string 
  $strlen_var = strlen($str); 

  // string bytes counter 
  $d = 0; 

 /* 
  * Iterate over every character in the string, 
  * escaping with a slash or encoding to UTF-8 where necessary 
  */ 
  for ($c = 0; $c < $strlen_var; ++$c) { 

      $ord_var_c = ord($str{$d}); 

      switch (true) { 
          case (($ord_var_c >= 0x20) && ($ord_var_c <= 0x7F)): 
              // characters U-00000000 - U-0000007F (same as ASCII) 
              $d++; 
              break; 

          case (($ord_var_c & 0xE0) == 0xC0): 
              // characters U-00000080 - U-000007FF, mask 110XXXXX 
              // see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8 
              $d+=2; 
              break; 

          case (($ord_var_c & 0xF0) == 0xE0): 
              // characters U-00000800 - U-0000FFFF, mask 1110XXXX 
              // see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8 
              $d+=3; 
              break; 

          case (($ord_var_c & 0xF8) == 0xF0): 
              // characters U-00010000 - U-001FFFFF, mask 11110XXX 
              // see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8 
              $d+=4; 
              break; 

          case (($ord_var_c & 0xFC) == 0xF8): 
              // characters U-00200000 - U-03FFFFFF, mask 111110XX 
              // see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8 
              $d+=5; 
              break; 

          case (($ord_var_c & 0xFE) == 0xFC): 
              // characters U-04000000 - U-7FFFFFFF, mask 1111110X 
              // see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8 
              $d+=6; 
              break; 
          default: 
            $d++;    
      } 
  } 

  return $d; 
} 
?> 

However when I try this with Russian (e.g. По своей природе компьютеры могут работать лишь с числами. И для того, чтобы они могли хранить в памяти буквы или другие символы, каждому такому символу должно быть поставлено в соответствие число.). It doesn't seem to return the correct number of bytes.

The switch statement is using the default condition. Any ideas why Russian characters would not be working as expected? Or would there be better options for this.

I am asking this as I need to shorten a UTF-8 string to a certain number of bytes. i.e. I can only send a max. of 169 bytes of JSON data to the iPhone APNS in my situation (excluding the other packet data).

Reference: PHP strlen - Manual (Paolo Comment on 10-Jan-2007 03:58)

Answer

Michael Borgwardt picture Michael Borgwardt · Mar 5, 2010

I am asking this as I need to shorten a utf-8 string to a certain number of bytes.

mb_strcut() does exactly this, though you might not be able to tell from the barely comprehensible documentation.