[RESOLVED] Substr problem with UTF-8

[2005]

I need to show first 50 charachters of the message as subject. I use this:

$subject = substr("$message", 0, 50);

It works correct with charachters like:

abcdefghjklt...

If message contains charachters of other languages, for example:

āēīūļķžčņō...

the $subject will be not 50 charachters long. It will much shorter depending of the amount of "special" charachters

I know, it's utf-8 problem. Is there any solution how to fix this? The same problem I have using function which checks the lenght of words to prevent users typing large words without spaces like wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...
If I set max charachters in a word to 30 it works OK in English. In other languages it's not possible to enter even 15 charachters.

Thank you.

[laserlight]

You may have to use [man]mb_strlen/man, but it may not be available.

[MarkR]

Use the mb_ functions instead of the standard string functions. The standard ones assume single-byte characters, and work on binary data rather than strings.

Ensure that the mb internal encoding is set correctly of course, before you do this.

Mark

[2005]

Great! Thank you. This works:

mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");
$subject = mb_substr($message,0,50);