Question

i am wondering when i check the length of the string with strlen function in php

it says its 32. however when i open that in a notepad or notepad++ i can see some empty spaces in the file (incorrect alignment with the other lines,

since i am doing a banking application strlen is critical to be 100% correct.

i am just wondering should i keep trusting this output or should i moved to something else like

mb_strlen

what is the best function to be trusted in normal ASCII character set ?

Answer 1

If you want to use strlen() or mb_strlen() depends on your servers setup, if it uses the mb_string extension or not. Though usually strlen() is overloaded with mb_strlen() anyway in those cases. Apart from that the computed values are 100% correct.

The difference you might see is how text (especially multibyte strings) is visualized if you open it in a text displaying application. It is much more likely that you get a misleading information there.