PHP UTF-8

A simple collection of functions to provide a standardized framework for working with multibyte strings (like UTF-8) in a variety of server environments. Requires either the mbstring or iconv extensions to work!

Function List

The following functions are included in this file to support most application needs when dealing with UTF-8 data.

• mb_str_split()
• mb_substr_replace()
• mb_strrev()
• is_ascii()
• seems_utf8()
• remove_accents()
• sanitize()
• sanitize_url()
• sanitize_filename()
• encode()

If the mbstring PHP extension is not loaded then the following functions are also created:

• mb_strlen()
• mb_substr()
• mb_strpos()
• mb_strrpos()
• mb_strtolower()
• mb_strtoupper()

Using UTF-8 in your application

All of these functions expect valid UTF-8 data. Therefore the first step in your application is to filter incoming data to insure it's valid.

$utf8_text = encode($_POST['text']);

From there on you can be sure that $utf8_text is valid UTF-8 and can be stored in your database or parsed by your application.

If using a database make sure to set the the proper connection encoding (MySQL example):

mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8');

Make sure to HTML encode everything you show to the user. This prevents XSS and CSFR attempts:

print htmlspecialchars($utf8_text, ENT_QUOTES, 'utf-8');

Also make sure to send the proper UTF-8 header if you are displaying HTML:

//Sending UTF-8 HTML data
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Have fun! David Pennington