php and Unicode

[gaouzief]

Hello,
i'am about to develop a little web app that should later be localised in other languages.

while doing some research on using unicode, i was told PHP does not support Unicode natively, but i still see some functions related to UTF-8 string:

utf_decode() and utf_encode()

Now i'm not an expert at Charsets and i have some "straight" questions to anyone with more experience with this issue:

• Will i be able to manipuate UTF-8 encoded strings with PHP?

• is it possible to insert and read UTF string to and from a database using php (ie without transforming the string)

and generally are there anythings i should be cautious about using PHP in a unicode environnement?

Thank you in advance

[gaouzief]

Anyone ?