mb_strlen() is it enough?

php utf-8 multilingual mbstring
PHPLOVER picture PHPLOVER · Sep 4, 2010 · Viewed 23.1k times · Source

When counting the length of an UTF-8 string in PHP I use mb_strlen().

For example:

if (mb_strlen($name, 'UTF-8') < 3) {
    $error .= 'Name is required. Minimum of 3 characters required in name.';
}

As the text fields can accept any language (multilanguage), I want to make sure that PHP will count mutltilanguage UTF-8 characters correctly.

Is this sufficient or do I need to use other methods? I am concerned PHP may get it wrong for some reason, or maybe I am just being skeptical, but I don't want people bypassing important validation because PHP is getting it wrong.

Answer

Pramendra Gupta picture Pramendra Gupta · Sep 4, 2010

Correct

if (mb_strlen($name, 'UTF-8') < 3) is sufficient enough

make sure header is correct

HTTP-header (Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8)

you can also check alternative for some reason

strlen(utf8_decode($string))

UTF-8 to Code Point Array Converter in PHP

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