Hướng dẫn php substr japanese characters

i'm echoing japanese characters fine but when i try to substr and echo out part of the string it just turn to question marks ���

note: i set my header to utf-8

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

and made the meta

$word = "せんせい";
echo $word;       //works just fine

echo substr($word,-1);    //now it just echoes �

//this one also failed
echo $word[0];    //echoes �

asked Jul 31, 2012 at 10:17

1

When working with your multibyte strings, you'll need to use the multibyte string functions, in this case mb_substr.

answered Jul 31, 2012 at 10:18

Michael RobinsonMichael Robinson

28.7k12 gold badges103 silver badges129 bronze badges

2

Try multibyte substrings, mb_substr() info found here This function is made for characters not in the english ascii code set.

answered Jul 31, 2012 at 10:19

mb_substr

will work. But, remember to add the following line at the top of your script:

mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");//Sets the internal character encoding to UTF-8, for mb_substr to work

answered Jan 7, 2015 at 5:10

oabarcaoabarca

10.4k6 gold badges56 silver badges70 bronze badges

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged php utf-8 character-encoding or ask your own question.

(PHP 4 >= 4.0.6, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

mb_substrGet part of string

Description

mb_substr(
    string $string,
    int $start,
    ?int $length = null,
    ?string $encoding = null
): string

Parameters

string

The string to extract the substring from.

start

If start is non-negative, the returned string will start at the start'th position in string, counting from zero. For instance, in the string 'abcdef', the character at position 0 is 'a', the character at position 2 is 'c', and so forth.

If start is negative, the returned string will start at the start'th character from the end of string.

length

Maximum number of characters to use from string. If omitted or NULL is passed, extract all characters to the end of the string.

encoding

The encoding parameter is the character encoding. If it is omitted or null, the internal character encoding value will be used.

Return Values

mb_substr() returns the portion of string specified by the start and length parameters.

Changelog

VersionDescription
8.0.0 encoding is nullable now.

See Also

  • mb_strcut() - Get part of string
  • mb_internal_encoding() - Set/Get internal character encoding

qbolec at gmail dot com

7 years ago

As you often need to iterate over UTF-8 characters inside a string, you might be tempted to use mb_substr($text,$i,1).
The problem with this is that there is no "magic" way to find $i-th character inside UTF-8 string, other than reading it byte by byte from the begining. Thus a loop which calls mb_substr($text,$i,1) N times for all possible N values of $i, will take much longer than expected. The larger the $i gets, the longer is the search for $i-th letter. As characters are between 1 to 6 bytes long, one can convince oneself, that the execution time of such loop is actually Theta(N^2), which can be really slow even for moderately long texts.
One way to work around it is to first split your text into an array of letters using some smart preprocessing, and only then iterate over the array.
Here is the idea:
class Strings
{
  public static function
len($a){
    return
mb_strlen($a,'UTF-8');
  }
  public static function
charAt($a,$i){
    return
self::substr($a,$i,1);
  }
  public static function
substr($a,$x,$y=null){
    if(
$y===NULL){
     
$y=self::len($a);
    }
    return
mb_substr($a,$x,$y,'UTF-8');
  }
  public static function
letters($a){
   
$len = self::len($a);
    if(
$len==0){
      return array();
    }else if(
$len == 1){
      return array(
$a);
    }else{
      return
Arrays::concat(
       
self::letters(self::substr($a,0,$len>>1)),
       
self::letters(self::substr($a,$len>>1))
      );
    }
  }
?>
As you can see, the Strings::letters($text) split the text recursively into two parts. Each level of the recursion requires time linear in the length of the string, and there is logarithmic number of levels, so the total runtime is O(N log N), which is still more than theoretically optimal O(N), but sadly this is the best idea I've got.

xiaogil at yahoo dot fr

17 years ago

Thanks Darien from /freenode #php for the following example (a little bit changed).

It just prints the 6th character of $string.
You can replace the digits by the same in japanese, chinese or whatever language to make a test, it works perfect.

mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");
$string = "0123456789";
$mystring = mb_substr($string,5,1);
echo
$mystring;
?>

(I couldn't replace 0123456789 by chinese numbers for example here, because it's automatically converted into latin digits on this website, look :
零一二三四
五六七八九)

gilv

drraf at tlen dot pl

17 years ago

Note: If borders are out of string - mb_string() returns empty _string_, when function substr() returns _boolean_ false in this case.
Keep this in mind when using "===" comparisions.

Example code:

var_dump

( substr( 'abc', 5, 2 ) ); // returns "false"
var_dump( mb_substr( 'abc', 5, 2 ) ); // returns ""?>

It's especially confusing when using mbstring with function overloading turned on.

desmatic at gmail dot com

9 years ago

quick and dirty loop through multibyte string
function get_character_classes($string, $encoding = "UTF-8") {
   
$current_encoding = mb_internal_encoding();
   
mb_internal_encoding($encoding);
   
$has = array();
   
$stringlength = mb_strlen($string, $encoding);
    for (
$i=0; $i < $stringlength; $i++) {
       
$c = mb_substr($string, $i, 1);
        if ((
$c >= "0") && ($c <= "9")) {
           
$has['numeric'] = "numeric";
        } else if ((
$c >= "a") && ($c <= "z")) {
           
$has['alpha'] = "alpha";
           
$has['alphalower'] = 'alphalower';
        } else if ((
$c >= "A") && ($c <= "Z")) {
           
$has['alpha'] = "alpha";
           
$has['alphaupper'] = "alphaupper";
        } else if ((
$c == "$") || ($c == "£")) {
           
$has['currency'] = "currency";
        } else if ((
$c == ".") && ($has['decimal'])) {
           
$has['decimals'] = "decimals";
        } else if (
$c == ".") {
           
$has['decimal'] = "decimal";
        } else if (
$c == ",") {
           
$has['comma'] = "comma";
        } else if (
$c == "-") {
           
$has['dash'] = "dash";
        } else if (
$c == " ") {
           
$has['space'] = "space";
        } else if (
$c == "/") {
           
$has['slash'] = "slash";
        } else if (
$c == ":") {
           
$has['colon'] = "colon";
        } else if ((
$c >= " ") && ($c <= "~")) {
           
$has['ascii'] = "ascii";
        } else {
           
$has['binary'] = "binary";
        }
    }
   
mb_internal_encoding($current_encoding);

        return

$has;
}
$string = "1234asdfA£^_{}|}~žščř";
echo
print_r(get_character_classes($string), true);
?>

Array
(
    [numeric] => numeric
    [alpha] => alpha
    [alphalower] => alphalower
    [alphaupper] => alphaupper
    [currency] => currency
    [ascii] => ascii
    [binary] => binary
)

p dot assenov at aip-solutions dot com

10 years ago

I'm trying to capitalize only the first character of the string and tried some of the examples above but they didn't work. It seems mb_substr() cannot calculate the length of the string in multi-byte encoding (UTF-8) and it should be set explicitly. Here is the corrected version:

function mb_ucfirst($str, $enc = 'utf-8') {
    return
mb_strtoupper(mb_substr($str, 0, 1, $enc), $enc).mb_substr($str, 1, mb_strlen($str, $enc), $enc);
}
?>

cheers!

qdinar at gmail dot com

6 years ago

you can make mb_substr working faster with long strings with usage of ucs-2 encoding.

header

('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
echo
'';

function

test($string, $encoding='utf8'){
   
$t1=microtime(true);
   
$textlen=mb_strlen($string);
   
$substr_len=3;
    for(
$i=0;$i<$textlen-$substr_len+1;$i++){
       
$substr=mb_substr($string,$i,$substr_len);
    }
    echo
'mb_substr, '.$encoding.': '.(microtime(true)-$t1);
    echo
' . check: ';
    if(
$encoding=='ucs2'){
       
$substr=mb_convert_encoding($substr,'utf-8','ucs2');
    }
   
var_dump( $substr );
    echo
' .
'
;
    echo
'
'
;
}
$corpus_short=str_repeat('тест Тест ',1000);
// it works likewise slowly with "test Test" with utf8
mb_internal_encoding('utf-8');
test($corpus_short);$corpus_short_ucs2=mb_convert_encoding($corpus_short,'ucs2','utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding('ucs2');
test($corpus_short_ucs2,'ucs2');?>

output:

mb_substr, utf8: 0.26480984687805 . check: string(5) "ст " .

mb_substr, ucs2: 0.0048871040344238 . check: string(5) "ст " .

sanjuro at 1up-games dot com

8 years ago

A serious pitfall when using mb_substr() set to HTML-ENTITIES encoding is that the function performs a number of conversions before returning the value, the worst one being that html special characters are not just counted but decoded.

mb_internal_encoding

("ISO-8859-1"); echo mb_internal_encoding(),"\n

\n"
;$a='jüst ä " simple " 日本 <b>test</b>';

echo

mb_substr($a,0),"\n

\n"
;
// page source: jüst ä " simple " 日本 <b>test</b>echo mb_substr($a,0,strlen($a),'HTML-ENTITIES');
// page source: jüst ä " simple " 日本 test?>

projektas at gmail dot com

13 years ago

First letter in upper case


header ('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

if (isset(

$_POST['check']) && !empty($_POST['check'])) {
    echo
htmlspecialchars(ucfirst_utf8($_POST['check']));
} else {
    echo
htmlspecialchars(ucfirst_utf8('Žąsinų'));
}

function

ucfirst_utf8($str) {
    if (
mb_check_encoding($str,'UTF-8')) {
       
$first = mb_substr(
           
mb_strtoupper($str, "utf-8"),0,1,'utf-8'
       
);
        return
$first.mb_substr(
           
mb_strtolower($str,"utf-8"),1,mb_strlen($str),'utf-8'
       
);
    } else {
        return
$str;
    }
}
?>