PHP Internationalization & Encoding

UTF-8 Everywhere

// Set early — affects all mb_* functions
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

// Use mb_* for all string operations on user text
$len   = mb_strlen($str);        // NOT strlen() — counts bytes, not chars
$upper = mb_strtoupper($str);    // NOT strtoupper()
$sub   = mb_substr($str, 0, 10); // NOT substr()
$pos   = mb_strpos($str, $needle);