Question

I want to get strlen() of Shift-jis and Utf-8, then compare them.
A string could be mixed “ああ12345678sdfdszzz”. I tried to use strlen but it generates the different results. mb_strlen also doesn’t help because this is a mixed string.

For example:

ああ12345678 >> strlen() = 24 chars
ああああああああああああああああ >> strlen() = 48 chars
ああああああああああああああああああ >> strlen() = 54 chars

It seems to be there is no rule. So what is the best way to calculate strlen and compare them in multilanguage?

Answer 1

strlen does only count the bytes and thus is only useful for single-byte character encodings; use mb_strlen for multi-byte character encodings that can count the actual characters instead.