Question

I need to get an array with all the characters from a word, but the word has letters with special encoding like á, when I execute the follow code:

$word = 'withá';

$word_arr = array();
for ($i=0;$i<strlen($word);$i++) {
    $word_arr[] = $word[$i];
}

or

$word_arr = str_split($word);

I get:

array(6) { [0]=> string(1) “w” [1]=> string(1) “i” [2]=> string(1) “t”
[3]=> string(1) “h” [4]=> string(1) “Ô [5]=> string(1) “¡” }

How can I do to obtain each character as follow?

array(5) { [0]=> string(1) “w” [1]=> string(1) “i” [2]=> string(1) “t”
[3]=> string(1) “h” [4]=> string(1) “á” }

Answer 1

Because it is a UTF-8 string, just do

$word = 'withá';
$word = utf8_decode($word);
$word_arr = array();
for ($i=0;$i<strlen($word);$i++) {
    $word_arr[] = $word[$i];
}

The reason for this is that, even though it looks right in your script, the interpreter converts it into a multibyte character (why mb_split() works as well). To convert it to proper UTF-8 format, you can use the mb functions or just specify utf8_decode().