Question

I need a regex to count characters in a string which need 2 keystrokes to create the character. I started out quite simple, just counting uppercase characters:

preg_match_all('/[A-Z]/', $string, $matches);

Now I also want to find circumflexed characters: â ê î û ô

Just adding these in the regex doesn’t seem to work, at least I receive some weird results:

$string = 'Têst';
echo preg_match_all('/[A-Z]/', $string, $matches);

will echo “1”, which is fine.

$string = 'Têst';
echo preg_match_all('/[A-Zê]/', $string, $treffer);

will echo “3”, which is weird.

Answer 1

You have to use the u modifier, otherwise “ê” is considered as having 2 chars (2 bytes):

$string = 'Têst';
echo preg_match_all('/[A-Zê]/u', $string, $treffer); // 2

Demo @ IDEOne.com.