Question

I have mbstring.func_overload = 7 and using UTF-8. Everything works fine but this not:

$str = "ãçéíõ";
echo $str[0];

It prints a question mark in the browser.

This instead works normally:

echo substr($str,0,1);

Someone knows why?

Answer 1

Yes, it’s because you are using multibyte strings, in which a single character is represented by one to four bytes. If you select just one byte (as in $str[0]) you probably have only a half character selected.
substr() instead is multibyte save and doesn’t count the bytes, but the chars.