Question

I’m currently using the substr() function which works fine for characters written in english. But when I apply that to characters written in greek, the text is cut with a strange character (a questionmark inside a diamond shape) appearing before the 3 fullstops (…).
Below is the code, thanks:

$string //a varchar string written in greek and called from the database 
if (strlen($string) > 200) {
    echo substr($string, 0, 200).'...';
}

Answer 1

Use multibyte functions like so:

mb_internal_encoding( "UTF-8" );

if( mb_strlen( $string ) > 200 ) {
   echo mb_substr( $string, 0, 200 ) . "...";
}

The normal functions work on bytes and don’t have any character awareness like you are expecting from them. Text using common english characters in UTF-8 are all 1 byte per character, so the normal functions accidentally work for them.