An ongoing helper library to make working with multibyte strings easier in PHP.
By default, the majority of PHP functions revolve around byte count instead of character count. If, for example, you want to find the position of a string stub inside a larger string that includes multibyte characters (UTF-8), then the returning positions will be incorrect.
require_once __DIR__ . "/vendor/autoload.php";
$string = <<<HTML
<title>♥ Love Your Home’s Pipes! Best Plumbing Around!</title>
HTML;
$multibyte = new MultiByteString($string);
$matches = $multibyte->findAllOccurrences("Plumbing");
// The $matches array is the same array result you would get from preg_match_all with the OFFSET flag used.
// This library corrects the string positions for you.
print("The first occurrence of {$matches[0][0]} starts at character {$matches[0][1]}");In this case, you can get a padding string surrounding your found stub with proper care for multibyte characters.
require_once __DIR__ . "/vendor/autoload.php";
$string = <<<HTML
<title>♥ Love Your Home’s Pipes! Best Plumbing Around!</title>
HTML;
$query = "Plumbing";
$multibyte = new MultiByteString($string);
$matches = $multibyte->findAllOccurrences($query);
$firstMatch = $matches[0];
$multibyteLengthOfQuery = mb_strlen($query);
$stubResult = $multibyte->getSubStringWithPadding(
start: $firstMatch[1],
stubMultiByteLength: $multibyteLengthOfQuery,
padding: 35,
);
// $stubResult is an instance of MultibyteStrings\StubResult
printf("Before: {$stubResult->beforeStub}\nStub: {$stubResult->stub}\nAfter: {$stubResult->afterStub}");